Assembly 101

Course Overview

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. 

Key Topics Covered:

• 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.
  

Prerequisites

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.

System Requirements

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. 

Who Should Take Assembly 101?

This course is geared towards complete beginners to assembly. While the course focuses on writing x86 assembly, the key takeaways for the course are an understanding of how computers work at a low level, what happens to higher level code once it is compiled and an understanding of what assembly code does. These takeaways serve as an excellent foundation for anyone looking to learn reverse engineering, malware analysis, binary exploitation, security research and even exploit development.