Debugging a Windows executable locally and remotely

Debugging a Windows executable locally and remotely

Last updated on September 01, 2020 - v0.2

This short tutorial introduces the main functionality of the IDA Debugger on Windows. IDA supports debugging of various binaries on various platforms, locally and remotely, but in this tutorial we will focus on debugging regular applications running on Windows.

Let’s see how the debugger can be used to locally debug a simple buggy C console program compiled under Windows.

Please use sample.exe.idb from samples.zip:

to follow this tutorial.

The buggy program

This program computes averages of a set of values (1, 2, 3, 4 and 5). Those values are stored in two arrays: one containing 8 bit values, the other containing 32-bit values.

#include <stdio.h>

char char_average(char array[], int count)
{
  int i;
  char average;
  average = 0;
  for (i = 0; i < count; i++)
  average += array[i];
  average /= count;
  return average;
}

int int_average(int array[], int count)
{
  int i, average;
  average = 0;
  for (i = 0; i < count; i++)
  average += array[i];
  average /= count;
  return average;
}