A couple of days ago, I saw that someone was looking for a way to load and use fake KERNEL32.dll and I realized that this information has not yet been covered here. There is no source code for this article as I am a bit short on time to write it, but I will do my best to provide as much information as possible so, those who would want to try it would have no problem doing that.

At good old times, memory was an expensive resource and developers had to take care of the size of the programs they create. Imagine how hard they had to work before there were high level languages (like C), before compilers became smart enough to handle all size optimization issues. Speed was also among the concerns, as the hardware was not as fast as it is now. Another headache was the need to interact with the underlying operating system. Or, to be more precise, the need to implement the interfaces (at pre-libc times). Modern operating systems provide a built-in mechanism for that. This mechanism is called API - Application Programming Interface. This mechanism is a blessing and curse in one. On one hand it greatly simplifies the interaction with the OS, on the other hand it just makes your software more vulnerable to hackers and/or malware. In some cases the usage of APIs just gets exaggerated.