Assembly 101

Welcome to Assembly 101! This course will teach you how computers work down to the lowest level and how to write and read the human readable version of the 1s and 0s they speak in – Assembly. The course starts with an introduction on how computers perform computations using transistors, logic gates and machine code (1s and 0s), then moves on to writing your own assembly programs. Students will start writing x86-16 assembly in a beginner-friendly 8086 emulator to learn the fundamentals and then move on to writing modern x86-64 assembly. 

• How computers work at a low level
• Numbering systems: Decimal, Hex and Binary
• Setting up an assembly development environment
• x86 Registers, Flags and Pointers
• x86 Instruction Set
• Learning x86 fundamentals by writing x86-16 assembly programs
• Writing modern x86-64 assembly
• Explore memory safety and learn about writing shellcode and exploiting stack overflows.

Programming 100: Fundamentals and Linux 100: Fundamentals, or equivalent knowledge!

Students should have a basic understanding and familiarity of programming with any high-level language.

Students will need a computer capable of running and x86-64 virtual machine. The first half of the course will use an emulator that can be run on most architectures, however the second half of the course will focus on x86-64 development without the use of an emulator. 

• Introduction
  • Course Introduction
  • Why You Should Learn Assembly
  • Lesson Formats and Where to Get Code Samples
  • Getting Help and Course Discord
• Intro to Computer Engineering
  • Section Intro
  • Numbering Systems (Decimal, Binary, Hex)
  • How Processors Work
  • Intro to the intel 8086
  • Quiz
• 8086 Development Setup
  • Downloading Resources
  • Ubuntu VM Setup
  • 8086 Web Emulator Installation
  • 8086 Web Emulator Intro
• Registers, MOV, and Interrupts
  • 8086 (x86-16) General Purpose Registers
  • Assembly Syntax
  • MOV
  • Code Challenge (0ff0 f00f)
  • Interrupts
  • Quiz
• Interacting with Memory
  • 8086 Memory Segmentation
  • MOV in/out of Memory
  • Endianness
  • Data Directive
  • Hello World!
  • Pointers
  • The Stack
  • Code Challenge
  • Quiz
• Arithmetic Operations
  • ADD
  • ADD with Carry Flag
  • SUB
  • Signed Numbers and Borrow Flag
  • MUL
  • DIV
  • Bitwise Boolean Logic
  • Quiz
• Accepting User Input
  • Accepting Single Char via Keyboard
  • Coding Challenge (Number Input)
  • Accepting Multiple Chars via Keyboard
  • Quiz
• Conditional Statements
  • CMP
  • JMPs
  • Chaining JMPs
  • Coding Challenge (Number Guessing Game)
  • Quiz
• Loops
  • Looping
  • Coding Challenge (Looping Number Guessing Game)
  • LODS
  • STOS
  • Coding Challenge (Number Addition)
  • Quiz
• Functions
  • Functions
  • Coding Challenge (Number Addition DNRY)
  • Quiz
• x86-16 Capstone Challenge
  • Coding Challenge (The Cyber Mentor Coding Challenge)
  • Quiz
• Intro to x86-64
  • AMD64 Programmer’s Manual
  • x86-16 to 32 to 64 Register Changes
  • Revisiting helloworld.c
  • Assembling and Linking
  • Using GDB
  • Function Epilogues and Prologues
  • Position Independent Code
  • Syscall
  • Write Syscall
  • Using Make
  • Read Syscall
  • NASM
  • Quiz
• x86-64 Functions
  • AMD64 System V Application Binary Interface
  • x86-64 Linux ASM Boilerplate
  • Interacting with Memory
  • Memory Alignment
  • Functions and Global Variables
  • Passing Args via Registers
  • Passing Args via Stack
  • Coding Challenge (Don’t Print X)
  • Quiz
• The Cyber Mentor Coding Challenge – x86-64 Assembly Version
• Memory Safety
  • Reviewing Stack Overflow Source Code
  • Investigating Stack Overflow with GDB
  • Basic Stack Overflow Exploit
  • Mitigating Stack Overflow Vulnerability
  • Writing Shellcode
  • Avoiding Bad Characters
  • Disabling Memory Corruption Protections
  • Stack Smashing with Shellcode
  • Reversing Shellcode
  • Coding Challenge (Privilege Escalation)
  • Quiz
• Course Outro