NASM Quick Tutorial
REVA
Introduction
It may be useful to write your own assembly programs, assemble them, and then inspect the
output as an aid when learning the (dis)assembly process. The Netwide Assembler (NASM) is
recommended as it’s cross-platform and freely available from the NASM site:
https://www.nasm.us/pub/nasm/stable/.
Tutorial
1. Use your favorite text editor to start writing assembly. The top of your file should include
the directive [BITS 32] to let nasm know it should compile using 32-bit code.
2. Follow the BITS directive with a directive to indicate that the next section should be con-
sidered “text”, which indicates executable code in this context. Use the section .text
directive to indicate this. This is not entirely necessary, but it shows you how to move
data into different sections.
3. Begin writing valid assembly! See below for an example.
[BITS 32] ; BITS directive
section .text ; section directive to indicate executable 'code'
push ebp
mov ebp, esp
lea esi, [ string ]
string:
db 'hello world',0xd,0x0
end_string:
Figure 1: View of the assembly that was hand-written
4. (Assuming Linux but Windows is similar). To assemble your newly created assembly to
machine code, run the following:
nasm ex2.S -o ex2
5. Assuming your syntax was correct, a new file named ex2 should be created. It is also
created in a format that your disassembler will be able to handle.
6. You can then use the ndisasm utility to disassemble your code to see what it looks like.
You can use the -u or -b 32 to force 32-bit disassembly. See below for an example.
Notice that the disassembly from address 0x00000009 and beyond is jibberish. This is
because ndisasm is a linear sweep disassembler and it is trying to disassemble the string
“hello world”.
user@reva:~/$ ndisasm -u ex2
00000000 55 push ebp
00000001 89E5 mov ebp,esp
00000003 8D3509000000 lea esi,[dword 0x9]
00000009 68656C6C6F push dword 0x6f6c6c65
0000000E 20776F and [edi+0x6f],dh
00000011 726C jc 0x7f
00000013 64 fs
00000014 0D db 0x0d
00000015 00 db 0x00
Figure 2: Output of ex2 disassembled by ndisasm
7. With binutils installed (e.g. sudo apt-get install binutils), you can use
objdump to have it disassemble the code for you so you can compare your disassembly
with a known good disassembler engine. Note by default objdump uses AT&T syntax,
whereas we will be using Intel syntax. To force objdump to use Intel syntax, use the
-M intel option. Use the -D option to indicate you want to disassemble all. Since
there is no header information, we must tell objdump this is a binary file. To do so, use
the -b binary option. Again, without the header, we need to inform objdump of the
processor. In this case, we want the Intel x86 processor so we supply -mi386.
user@reva:~/$ objdump -M intel -D -b binary -mi386 ex2
ex2: file format binary
Disassembly of section .data:
00000000 <.data>:
0: 55 push ebp
1: 89 e5 mov ebp,esp
3: 8d 35 09 00 00 00 lea esi,ds:0x9
9: 68 65 6c 6c 6f push 0x6f6c6c65
e: 20 77 6f and BYTE PTR [edi+0x6f],dh
11: 72 6c jb 0x7f
13: 64 fs
14: 0d .byte 0xd
Figure 3: Output of ex2 disassembled by objdump
