Do Hackers Need To Know Algorithms and Data Structures?

Key Takeaways

I got this question on Twitter Hey live overflow how good should I be at data structures and algorithms for reverse engineering low level hacking and all that stuff that's a really good question so let me tell you my opinion [Music] this video is sponsored by hackstreet.io if you want to learn hacking web security reverse engineering and exploitation and all this kind of stuff check out our Discord and our courses on hex3.io alright so first of all I have to say what does it even mean to be good like how do you measure good usually in terms of algorithm and data structures you're obviously in a university or School environment and good that means good grades but it's very difficult to say you need this great and this is exactly what you need for reverse engineering that doesn't really make sense also school grades are often about memorization and in the real world you can usually look it up however generally there's one principle I love to say and that is the more you know the more you know I also give an example of that if you are able to understand French language that can help when you are reversing some French malware because there are some maybe some French words and those French words have a certain meaning and that helps you better understand what the malware maybe is doing so you never know like what what kind of knowledge is really useful and you can kind of imagine if you would know everything on the world then of course you would be a very skilled hacker because you know everything so having heard of different algorithms and data structures can of course be helpful to recognize them in code and especially in assembly if you know about linked lists and the concept how that is implemented in memory then it's probably easier to recognize that in assembly and it turns out I actually have a practical example of that also in one of my videos a while ago I made this pseudo Series where from start to beginning we basically discover and then exploit a vulnerability in pseudo the pseudo-edit vulnerability and in episode 10 where we were developing a tool to find function pointers on the Heap we were looking at the stack Trace in GDB and there was something I recognized it's something small it's not necessarily important but it helped me to better kind of understand like what what even are we looking at here and it's here I'll be fine and it says here it's a struct rb3 so this is probably a red black tree which is like something you learn about maybe in University so I feel like that made it a bit easier for me it was not necessary and obviously you don't need to be an expert or anything like this but the more you know the more you know also stack smashing was chiming in and sharing his opinion as well and he said in his opinion algorithms are not that important but data structures is very important for reverse engineering but then also that are two color answered that some familiarity with most common algorithms like searching and sorting algorithms can be very useful you know if you find a function that does some crazy stuff and you realize oh it's just sorting these array of strings or something like this then that also helps a lot so it can help you save time recognizing common data structures and various trees and graphs but yeah it's difficult to say like how good do you then know algorithms and data structures is difficult to you know rank this hopefully this motivates you to pay attention in data structures and algorithms these were one of the more you know boring classes I guess in University they feel very dry and theoretical but I mean you don't have to go for the best grade or anything like this but having heard of all the different algorithms and data structures it definitely helps maybe you recognize them like I recognized rb3 red black tree in the code and then you can again read up on it how it works and so having generally a good understanding and knowing what you don't know like knowing what exists out there that already will help you a lot if you're looking for more videos about hacking and I.T security and computer science yeah check out some of these videos here and of course check out hexfree.io if you are interested in some online courses on web security reverse engineering and all that kind of stuff we also have a great Discord community so go check out hex3.io