The Book Of Binaries

Hi everyone, InnocentZero here. I’ve taken up on a very ambitious and extensive “project” if you choose to call it that. I’ll be writing a book about binaries. That’s it. Executables. But of all sorts.

The main focus will be from a security and optimization point of view. It plans to touch a vast range of topics ranging from compilers and linkers to operating systems, embedded firmware and hardware design. Once again, all from the point of view of mainly security.

This is a massive project and would require many months if not complete years to be in a remotely publishable stage. As of now, one of the chapters that serves as a basic introdcution to C programming is complete.

Why do it?

Simply because we love sharing knowledge. On a personal basis, I want this book to be a complete and total encyclopedic and academic text to everything about executables. Let’s see how we reach there and if there’s a change of plans in between.

When I first entered this domain, the hardest part was to get a proper source of information and knowledge in this field in particular. Web is easy, forensics is mostly about dealing with the data given at hand and seeing if you can extract something from it and cryptography is just mathematics. But to understand rev and pwn, you need a very solid base that most people often do not have. And many a times, CTF write-ups just tell you how to exploit a challenge without telling you the exact specifics of it. The why. That’s what this book is for.

While there are many other notable attempts at this, the most important one being “The Art of Exploitation”, I feel they are somewhat dry in nature and not engaging enough for the audience. On the other hand, this book is a direct inspiration from the “The Art of Computer Programming”, as I definitely found it to be a very engaging text.

The How, typst and more

The book is available for free here. It utilizes the new typst tool for generation of the book. I chose this because it’s far easier and faster to compose books in typst than in Latex. It is licensed under Creative Commons, so with proper attribution nobody should have issues utilizing or promoting the book.