$ cat projects/reverse-engineering-lab.md
Reverse engineering lab
What it is
A safe home lab for taking binaries apart. Everything runs inside an isolated virtual machine with clean snapshots, so a sample can never touch anything I care about — and I can roll back to a known-good baseline after every session.
What’s in it
- Isolation: a Debian-based guest with host-only networking and a
clean-baselinesnapshot. - Static analysis:
radare2,file,strings,xxd, plus Ghidra for a friendlier disassembler. - Dynamic analysis:
gdb,ltrace,stracefor tracing behaviour at runtime.
What I learned
Building the lab was half the lesson: how ELF binaries are laid out, how to read a disassembly and work backwards from a comparison to the input that satisfies it, and how to keep an analysis environment disposable.
The full step-by-step is in the write-up: Building a reverse engineering lab on Linux.