VCA-RE-011 — Introduction to Reverse Engineering
The course that gets students ready for VCA-RE-101. Hex editors, x86-64 assembly, Ghidra, a working ladder of CrackMe challenges, and a guided firmware teardown on a training target. Students leave knowing how to read a binary, navigate a disassembler, and write a professional-register finding report. RE-011 is the conceptual scaffolding that turns the flagship’s graduate-register pace from exhausting into merely intense.
Course Overview
VCA-RE-011 is deliberately an introductory RE course, not a light version of RE-101. The flagship assumes students can read compiled binaries, use a disassembler productively, and write a report that someone at USENIX would take seriously. RE-011 builds exactly those skills. It introduces the analytical posture — “the program is in front of me, I will understand it” — alongside the tooling fluency that makes the posture viable.
What Students Learn
- File formats. ELF, PE, and Mach-O at the level needed to identify sections, symbols, and entry points.
- Hex editor fluency. Reading raw bytes, recognizing magic numbers, repairing simple corruption.
- x86-64 assembly. Enough to read compiler output: registers, stack, calling conventions, common idioms, control flow.
- Ghidra. Project setup, cross-references, the decompiler, data-type inference, naming discipline.
- CrackMe ladder. A structured progression from “find the password check” through anti-debug tricks, packing, and simple obfuscation.
- Guided firmware teardown. One instructor-selected target worked through together before the capstone.
- Report writing. The report is the deliverable in this field; students practice the register from Week 1.
Capstone (Planned)
A professional-register firmware analysis report on an instructor-selected training target (a step smaller and more tractable than the RE-101 SB6141 capstone). The student documents the extraction, the binaries found, the salient findings, and presents the work in a five-minute oral summary.
Certification Alignment
No industry certification covers this content at the 11th-grade register. The course prepares conceptually for GIAC GREM (Reverse Engineering Malware) post-career-start, but GREM itself is an expensive ($8k+) professional certification typically pursued with employer funding. The Virtus certificate is the credential of record at this level.
Interested in VCA-RE-011?
Email academy@virtuscybersecurity.com with your register and why.