Keith Makan

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Introduction to the ELF Format : The ELF Header (Part I)

ELF Files are charged with using their magic to perform two holy tasks in the linux universe. The first being to tell the kernel where to place stuff in memory from the ELF file on disk as well as providing ways to invoke the dynamic loaders functions and maybe even help out with some debugging information. Essentially speaking its telling the kernel where to put it in memory and also the plethora of tools that interpret the file where all the data structures are that hold useful information for making sense of the file. Anyway that's as far as I've figured it out - the actual break down is a little less simple.

I'll demonstrate why this is so here and over the next series of posts in the classic "Learn things by breaking them" style.
ELF Header and Identification fields The first thing that appears in an ELF file is of course the header, which is like most things in file formats just a list of offsets in the file. Its purpose is to indicate essentially what kin…

Glibc Heap Exploitation Basics : Introduction to ptmalloc2 internals (Part 1)

In this post and the others in this series, I will unpack some of the internals to glibc's dynamic heap data structures and associated beasts. This post specifically will start you off with no background insight on the heap (perhaps a little on ELF internals and debugging), and detail some experiments you can perform to learn how the heap works.

Introduction
The Heap is essentially a list of memory regions an executing program uses to store data. The data stored in heap regions are requested during runtime. It allows runtime environments like glibc to offer programs dynamic memory for allocating data. So because this offer's memory regions as kind of a "service" (this is what it is for - giving out memory regions), it must mean some where in this whole mess, there needs to be some accounting information about the memory regions. To this aid; the heap describes or decorates user data regions with an internal structure called a chunk. Chunks are in turn classified an…

Introduction to the ELF Format (Part VI) : The Symbol Table and Relocations (Part 1)

This post is part of a series on the ELF format, if you haven't checked out the other parts of the series here they are:

(Part I) : ELF Header https://blog.k3170makan.com/2018/09/introduction-to-elf-format-elf-header.html (Part II) : Program Headers https://blog.k3170makan.com/2018/09/introduction-to-elf-format-part-ii.html (Part III) : Section Header Table https://blog.k3170makan.com/2018/09/introduction-to-elf-file-format-part.html (Part IV) : Section Types and Special Sections https://blog.k3170makan.com/2018/10/introduction-to-elf-format-part-iv.html(Part V) : C Start up https://blog.k3170makan.com/2018/10/introduction-to-elf-format-part-v.htmlthis
In this and the next post I'm going to explore how Elf files manage to pull off the magic of symbol resolution as well as the format, offsets and records in the Elf that represent this information. There are many facets to this mechanism in the format, and before I get into each of them I'd like to provide a gentle intro …

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Keith Makan