I'm participating in a ctf where one task is to reverse a row of input bytes using an assembly-ish environment. The input is x bytes long and the last byte is always 0x00. One example would be :
Input 4433221100, output 0011223344
I'm thinking that a loop that loops until it reaches input 00 is a place to start.
Do any of you have a suggestion on how to approach this? I don't need specific code examples, but some advice to point me in the right direction would be great. I only have basic alu operations, jumps and conditional jumps, storing and reading memory addresses, and some other basic stuff available. All alu operations are mod 256.
Yes, finding the length by searching for the 0 byte to find the end / length is one way to start. Depending on where you want the destination, it's possible to copy in the same loop that searches for the end.
If you want to reverse in-place, you need to find the end first (with a separate loop). Then you can load from both ends, store registers to opposite locations, and walk your pointers inward until they cross, standard in-place reverse that you can find examples of anywhere.
If you want make a reversed copy into other space, you could do it in one pass over the source (without finding the length first). Store output starting from the end of a buffer, decrementing the output pointer as you increment the read pointer. When you're done, you have a pointer to the start of the reversed copy, which you can pass to an output function. You won't know where you're going to stop, so the buffer needs to be big enough. But since you're just passing the pointer to another function, it's fine that you don't know (until you're done copying) where the start of the reversed copy will be.
You could still separately find the length and then copy, but that would be pointlessly inefficient.
If you need the reversed copy to start at some known position in another buffer (e.g. to append to another string or array), you would need the length or a pointer to the end before you store anything, so it's a 2-pass operation like reversing in-place.
You can then read the source backwards and write the destination forwards (or "output" each byte 1 at a time to some IO stream). Your loop termination condition could be a down-counter or a pointer compare using a pointer in a register, comparing src against the already-known start of the source or dst against the calculated end of the destination.
Or you can read the source forwards until you reach the position you found for the end, storing in reverse order starting from the calculated end of where the destination should go.
(If your machine is like 6502 and can easily index into a static array, but not easily keep a whole pointer in a register, obviously you'll want to use indices that count from 0. That makes detecting the start even easier, like sub reg, 1 / jnz if subtract already sets flags for a conditional branch to test.)