Identifying Technology Stack in Windows Applications

Introduction

When pentesting a Windows application, the first thing I want to know is what technology it’s built with. A .NET app, an Electron app, and a native C++ binary need very different tooling, so getting this right early shapes the rest of the assessment.

In this post, I’ll walk through how I fingerprint a binary’s tech stack on Windows.

Why Technology Detection Matters

Different technologies have different attack surfaces. For example:

• .NET applications → Easy to decompile with dnSpyEx or ILSpy
• Native C/C++ → Memory corruption vulnerabilities like buffer overflows
• Electron apps → Node.js vulnerabilities and XSS in webviews
• Delphi / VB6 → Require specific decompilers like IDR or VB Decompiler
• Packed/Protected → Must be unpacked before analysis

Knowing the technology helps us choose the right testing approach and exploitation techniques.

Detection Tools

Detect It Easy (DiE)

DiE is the tool I usually use first when analyzing Windows executables. It’s open-source and available on GitHub.

How to use:

1. Download and extract DiE from the releases page
2. Run die.exe
3. Open the executable you want to analyze (File → Open or drag and drop)
4. DiE will automatically show the detection results

As an example, let’s analyze Notepad from C:\Windows\notepad.exe:

Compiler: Microsoft Visual C/C++(19.36.33145)[LTCG/C]
Linker: Microsoft Linker(14.36.33145)
Language: C++
Tool: Visual Studio(2022, v17.6)

From the results, we can see that Notepad is a native C++ application compiled with Visual Studio 2022.

Additional samples to try:

If you want to practice identifying different technologies, here are some executables you can download:

Technology	Application	Description
Go	Hugo	Static compiled Go binary
Delphi/Pascal	Cheat Engine	Delphi GUI application
Electron	VS Code	Electron-based editor with JavaScript/TypeScript
.NET	dnSpy	.NET Framework application
Packed (UPX)	UPX	Self-packed executable
Rust	Alacritty	Terminal emulator written in Rust

Alternative Tools

• Nauz File Detector - Linker/compiler/tool detector by the same developer as DiE (GitHub)
• CFF Explorer - PE structure inspector, closed-source, last updated 2012 (ntcore.com)
• strings - Complementary tool to extract readable strings for manual fingerprinting (Sysinternals)

Conclusion

We’ve covered how to identify a Windows binary’s tech stack. The rest of the pentest follows from there. I’ll try to publish the follow-up techniques on this blog under Windows Technique.