Let's say I have a program (program.c) that uses rand function in standard C library.
1 #include <stdlib.h>
2 int main(){
3 int rand_number = rand();
4 }
I also have a shared library (intercept.c) that I created to change the behaviour of rand function (simply adds +1 to the result) in the standard library.
int rand(void){
int (*rand_func)();
rand_func = dlsym(RTLD_NEXT, "rand");
int result = (*rand_func)();
return result + 1;
}
And I run the program with
LD_PRELOAD=./intercept.so ./program
Is there any way to get the line number (Line 3) and name of the caller function (main) without modifying the program.c's source code?
It is not immediate, but you can use backtrace() in order to obtain each frame in the call stack.
Then invoking the external command eu-addr2line -f -C -s --pretty-print -p your_pid the_previous_frames... (with popen() or pipe()/fork()/dup2()/exec()...) and parsing its output will provide the information you need
(if compiled with -g).
regarding:
Is there any way to get the line number (Line 3) and name of the caller function (main) without modifying the program.c's source code?
compile the program with the -ggdb3 option, Then set a break point where you want to stop the program. Then use the backtrace command bt. This will show the function names, the line numbers, etc
Another (Linux specific) approach is to compile everything with -g (perhaps also -O) using GCC and to use Ian Taylor's excellent libbacktrace.
That library parses the DWARF debug information and knows line numbers.
You'll need several hours to understand libbacktrace (read carefully the header file). I am using it in RefPerSys
I am running busybox v1.27.2 on an embedded linux system. To test my userspace build environment, I have cross compiled a simple hello-world application titled "hello". The system does not have library files available, so I have statically linked with uClibc. I have confirmed the binary was built correct using file:
hello: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, ARM, EABI5 version 1 (SYSV), statically linked, not stripped
when I try and execute from target rootfs, I get the following:
/ # ./hello
hello: applet not found
I have tried executing from /usr/bin and other directories, result is the same. I understand this message can occur when symlinks are not correctly pointing to busybox binary. However I am confused as this application should not depend on busybox. Any help would be appreciated.
Here is the code for reference:
// C library headers
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
printf("hello world");
return 0;
}
Fixed this buy re-compiling uClibc & "hello" binary with arm-buildroot-uclinux-uclibcgnueabi-gcc toolchain from buildroot
I am trying to write a program in C that would be able to call certain binaries (ex. lsof, netstat) with options. The purpose of this program is to collect forensic data from a computer, while at the same time this program should not use the binaries of the computer under analysis as they might be compromised. As a result it is required the certified/uncompromised binaries (ex. lsof, netstat -antpu etc) already to be embedded in a C program or to be called by the C program stored in a usb drive for example.
Having for example the binary of the "ls" command I created an object file using the linker as follows:
$ ld -s -r -b binary -o testls.o bin-x86-2.4/ls
Using the following command I extracted the following entry points from the object file
$ nm testls.o
000000000007a0dc D _binary_bin_x86_2_4_ls_end
000000000007a0dc A _binary_bin_x86_2_4_ls_size
0000000000000000 D _binary_bin_x86_2_4_ls_start
The next step would be to call the "function" from the main program with some options that I might need for example "ls -al". Thus I made a C program to call the entry point of the object file.
Then I compiled the program with the following gcc options
gcc -Wall -static testld.c testls.o -o testld
This is the main program:
#include <stdio.h>
extern int _binary_bin_x86_2_4_ls_start();
int main(void)
{
_binary_bin_x86_2_4_ls_start();
return 0;
}
When I run the program I am getting a segmentation fault. I checked the entry points using the objdump in the testld program and the linking seems to be successful. Why then I am getting a segmentation fault?
I still need also to call "ls" with options. How I could do this, i.e. call the "function" with the arguments "-al".
Thank you.
The ELF header of a binary isn't a function. You can't call it. If you could (like in some ancient binary formats) it would be a really bad idea because it would never return.
If you want to run another program midstream do this:
int junk;
pid_t pid;
if (!(pid = fork())) {
execl("ls", "/bin/ls", ...); /* this results in running ls in current directory which is probably what you want but maybe you need to adjust */
_exit(3);
}
if (pid > 0) waitpid(pid, &junk, 0);
Error handling omitted for brevity.
In your case, you should ship your own copies of your binaries alongside your program.
Is it possible to compile a C++ (or the like) program without generating the executable file but writing it and executing it directly from memory?
For example with GCC and clang, something that has a similar effect to:
c++ hello.cpp -o hello.x && ./hello.x $# && rm -f hello.x
In the command line.
But without the burden of writing an executable to disk to immediately load/rerun it.
(If possible, the procedure may not use disk space or at least not space in the current directory which might be read-only).
Possible? Not the way you seem to wish. The task has two parts:
1) How to get the binary into memory
When we specify /dev/stdout as output file in Linux we can then pipe into our program x0 that reads
an executable from stdin and executes it:
gcc -pipe YourFiles1.cpp YourFile2.cpp -o/dev/stdout -Wall | ./x0
In x0 we can just read from stdin until reaching the end of the file:
int main(int argc, const char ** argv)
{
const int stdin = 0;
size_t ntotal = 0;
char * buf = 0;
while(true)
{
/* increasing buffer size dynamically since we do not know how many bytes to read */
buf = (char*)realloc(buf, ntotal+4096*sizeof(char));
int nread = read(stdin, buf+ntotal, 4096);
if (nread<0) break;
ntotal += nread;
}
memexec(buf, ntotal, argv);
}
It would also be possible for x0 directly execute the compiler and read the output. This question has been answered here: Redirecting exec output to a buffer or file
Caveat: I just figured out that for some strange reason this does not work when I use pipe | but works when I use the x0 < foo.
Note: If you are willing to modify your compiler or you do JIT like LLVM, clang and other frameworks you could directly generate executable code. However for the rest of this discussion I assume you want to use an existing compiler.
Note: Execution via temporary file
Other programs such as UPX achieve a similar behavior by executing a temporary file, this is easier and more portable than the approach outlined below. On systems where /tmp is mapped to a RAM disk for example typical servers, the temporary file will be memory based anyway.
#include<cstring> // size_t
#include <fcntl.h>
#include <stdio.h> // perror
#include <stdlib.h> // mkostemp
#include <sys/stat.h> // O_WRONLY
#include <unistd.h> // read
int memexec(void * exe, size_t exe_size, const char * argv)
{
/* random temporary file name in /tmp */
char name[15] = "/tmp/fooXXXXXX";
/* creates temporary file, returns writeable file descriptor */
int fd_wr = mkostemp(name, O_WRONLY);
/* makes file executable and readonly */
chmod(name, S_IRUSR | S_IXUSR);
/* creates read-only file descriptor before deleting the file */
int fd_ro = open(name, O_RDONLY);
/* removes file from file system, kernel buffers content in memory until all fd closed */
unlink(name);
/* writes executable to file */
write(fd_wr, exe, exe_size);
/* fexecve will not work as long as there in a open writeable file descriptor */
close(fd_wr);
char *const newenviron[] = { NULL };
/* -fpermissive */
fexecve(fd_ro, argv, newenviron);
perror("failed");
}
Caveat: Error handling is left out for clarities sake. Includes for sake of brevity.
Note: By combining step main() and memexec() into a single function and using splice(2) for copying directly between stdin and fd_wr the program could be significantly optimized.
2) Execution directly from memory
One does not simply load and execute an ELF binary from memory. Some preparation, mostly related to dynamic linking, has to happen. There is a lot of material explaining the various steps of the ELF linking process and studying it makes me believe that theoretically possible. See for example this closely related question on SO however there seems not to exist a working solution.
Update UserModeExec seems to come very close.
Writing a working implementation would be very time consuming, and surely raise some interesting questions in its own right. I like to believe this is by design: for most applications it is strongly undesirable to (accidentially) execute its input data because it allows code injection.
What happens exactly when an ELF is executed? Normally the kernel receives a file name and then creates a process, loads and maps the different sections of the executable into memory, performs a lot of sanity checks and marks it as executable before passing control and a file name back to the run-time linker ld-linux.so (part of libc). The takes care of relocating functions, handling additional libraries, setting up global objects and jumping to the executables entry point. AIU this heavy lifting is done by dl_main() (implemented in libc/elf/rtld.c).
Even fexecve is implemented using a file in /proc and it is this need for a file name that leads us to reimplement parts of this linking process.
Libraries
UserModeExec
libelf -- read, modify, create ELF files
eresi -- play with elfes
OSKit (seems like a dead project though)
Reading
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/1060?page=0,0 -- introduction
http://wiki.osdev.org/ELF -- good overview
http://s.eresi-project.org/inc/articles/elf-rtld.txt -- more detailed Linux-specific explanation
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/33340/Code-Injection-into-Running-Linux-Application -- how to get to hello world
http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~charngda/elf.html -- nice reference of ELF structure
Loaders and Linkers by John Levine -- deeoer explanation of linking
Related Questions at SO
Linux user-space ELF loader
ELF Dynamic loader symbol lookup ordering
load-time ELF relocation
How do global variables get initialized by the elf loader
So it seems possible, you decide whether is also practical.
Yes, though doing it properly requires designing significant parts of the compiler with this in mind. The LLVM guys have done this, first with a kinda-separate JIT, and later with the MC subproject. I don't think there's a ready-made tool doing it. But in principle, it's just a matter of linking to clang and llvm, passing the source to clang, and passing the IR it creates to MCJIT. Maybe a demo does this (I vaguely recall a basic C interpreter that worked like this, though I think it was based on the legacy JIT).
Edit: Found the demo I recalled. Also, there's cling, which seems to do basically what I described, but better.
Linux can create virtual file systems in RAM using tempfs. For example, I have my tmp directory set up in my file system table like so:
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs nodev,nosuid 0 0
Using this, any files I put in /tmp are stored in my RAM.
Windows doesn't seem to have any "official" way of doing this, but has many third-party options.
Without this "RAM disk" concept, you would likely have to heavily modify a compiler and linker to operate completely in memory.
If you are not specifically tied to C++, you may also consider other JIT based solutions:
in Common Lisp SBCL is able to generate machine code on the fly
you could use TinyCC and its libtcc.a which emits quickly poor (i.e. unoptimized) machine code from C code in memory.
consider also any JITing library, e.g. libjit, GNU Lightning, LLVM, GCCJIT, asmjit
of course emitting C++ code on some tmpfs and compiling it...
But if you want good machine code, you'll need it to be optimized, and that is not fast (so the time to write to a filesystem is negligible).
If you are tied to C++ generated code, you need a good C++ optimizing compiler (e.g. g++ or clang++); they take significant time to compile C++ code to optimized binary, so you should generate to some file foo.cc (perhaps in a RAM file system like some tmpfs, but that would give a minor gain, since most of the time is spent inside g++ or clang++ optimization passes, not reading from disk), then compile that foo.cc to foo.so (using perhaps make, or at least forking g++ -Wall -shared -O2 foo.cc -o foo.so, perhaps with additional libraries). At last have your main program dlopen that generated foo.so. FWIW, MELT was doing exactly that, and on Linux workstation the manydl.c program shows that a process can generate then dlopen(3) many hundred thousands of temporary plugins, each one being obtained by generating a temporary C file and compiling it. For C++ read the C++ dlopen mini HOWTO.
Alternatively, generate a self-contained source program foobar.cc, compile it to an executable foobarbin e.g. with g++ -O2 foobar.cc -o foobarbin and execute with execve that foobarbin executable binary
When generating C++ code, you may want to avoid generating tiny C++ source files (e.g. a dozen lines only; if possible, generate C++ files of a few hundred lines at least; unless lots of template expansion happens thru extensive use of existing C++ containers, where generating a small C++ function combining them makes sense). For instance, try if possible to put several generated C++ functions in the same generated C++ file (but avoid having very big generated C++ functions, e.g. 10KLOC in a single function; they take a lot of time to be compiled by GCC). You could consider, if relevant, to have only one single #include in that generated C++ file, and pre-compile that commonly included header.
Jacques Pitrat's book Artificial Beings, the conscience of a conscious machine (ISBN 9781848211018) explains in details why generating code at runtime is useful (in symbolic artificial intelligence systems like his CAIA system). The RefPerSys project is trying to follow that idea and generate some C++ code (and hopefully, more and more of it) at runtime. Partial evaluation is a relevant concept.
Your software is likely to spend more CPU time in generating C++ code than GCC in compiling it.
tcc compiler "-run" option allows for exactly this, compile into memory, run there and finally discard the compiled stuff. No filesystem space needed. "tcc -run" can be used in shebang to allow for C script, from tcc man page:
#!/usr/local/bin/tcc -run
#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
printf("Hello World\n");
return 0;
}
C scripts allow for mixed bash/C scripts, with "tcc -run" not needing any temporary space:
#!/bin/bash
echo "foo"
sed -n "/^\/\*\*$/,\$p" $0 | tcc -run -
exit
/**
*/
#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
printf("bar\n");
return 0;
}
Execution output:
$ ./shtcc2
foo
bar
$
C scripts with gcc are possible as well, but need temporary space like others mentioned to store executable. This script produces same output as the previous one:
#!/bin/bash
exc=/tmp/`basename $0`
if [ $0 -nt $exc ]; then sed -n "/^\/\*\*$/,\$p" $0 | gcc -x c - -o $exc; fi
echo "foo"
$exc
exit
/**
*/
#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
printf("bar\n");
return 0;
}
C scripts with suffix ".c" are nice, headtail.c was my first ".c" file that needed to be executable:
$ echo -e "1\n2\n3\n4\n5\n6\n7" | ./headtail.c
1
2
3
6
7
$
I like C scripts, because you just have one file, you can easily move around, and changes in bash or C part require no further action, they just work on next execution.
P.S:
The above shown "tcc -run" C script has a problem, C script stdin is not available for executed C code. Reason was that I passed extracted C code via pipe to "tcc -run". New gist run_from_memory_stdin.c does it correctly:
...
echo "foo"
tcc -run <(sed -n "/^\/\*\*$/,\$p" $0) 42
...
"foo" is printed by bash part, "bar 42" from C part (42 is passed argv[1]), and piped script input gets printed from C code then:
$ route -n | ./run_from_memory_stdin.c
foo
bar 42
Kernel IP routing table
Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface
0.0.0.0 172.29.58.98 0.0.0.0 UG 306 0 0 wlan1
10.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 wlan0
169.254.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.0.0 U 303 0 0 wlan0
172.29.58.96 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.252 U 306 0 0 wlan1
$
One can easily modify the compiler itself. It sounds hard first but thinking about it, it seams obvious. So modifying the compiler sources directly expose a library and make it a shared library should not take that much of afford (depending on the actual implementation).
Just replace every file access with a solution of a memory mapped file.
It is something I am about to do with compiling something transparently in the background to op codes and execute those from within Java.
-
But thinking about your original question it seams you want to speed up compilation and your edit and run cycle. First of all get a SSD-Disk you get almost memory speed (use a PCI version) and lets say its C we are talking about. C does this linking step resulting in very complex operations that are likely to take more time than reading and writing from / to disk. So just put everything on SSD and live with the lag.
Finally the answer to OP question is yes!
I found memrun repo from guitmz, that demoed running (x86_64) ELF from memory, with golang and assembler. I forked that, and provided C version of memrun, that runs ELF binaries (verified on x86_64 and armv7l), either from standard input, or via first argument process substitution. The repo contains demos and documentation (memrun.c is 47 lines of code only):
https://github.com/Hermann-SW/memrun/tree/master/C#memrun
Here is simplest example, with "-o /dev/fd/1" gcc compiled ELF gets sent to stdout, and piped to memrun, which executes it:
pi#raspberrypi400:~/memrun/C $ gcc info.c -o /dev/fd/1 | ./memrun
My process ID : 20043
argv[0] : ./memrun
no argv[1]
evecve --> /usr/bin/ls -l /proc/20043/fd
total 0
lr-x------ 1 pi pi 64 Sep 18 22:27 0 -> 'pipe:[1601148]'
lrwx------ 1 pi pi 64 Sep 18 22:27 1 -> /dev/pts/4
lrwx------ 1 pi pi 64 Sep 18 22:27 2 -> /dev/pts/4
lr-x------ 1 pi pi 64 Sep 18 22:27 3 -> /proc/20043/fd
pi#raspberrypi400:~/memrun/C $
The reason I was interested in this topic was usage in "C script"s. run_from_memory_stdin.c demonstrates all together:
pi#raspberrypi400:~/memrun/C $ wc memrun.c | ./run_from_memory_stdin.c
foo
bar 42
47 141 1005 memrun.c
pi#raspberrypi400:~/memrun/C $
The C script producing shown output is so small ...
#!/bin/bash
echo "foo"
./memrun <(gcc -o /dev/fd/1 -x c <(sed -n "/^\/\*\*$/,\$p" $0)) 42
exit
/**
*/
#include <stdio.h>
int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
printf("bar %s\n", argc>1 ? argv[1] : "(undef)");
for(int c=getchar(); EOF!=c; c=getchar()) { putchar(c); }
return 0;
}
P.S:
I added tcc's "-run" option to gcc and g++, for details see:
https://github.com/Hermann-SW/memrun/tree/master/C#adding-tcc--run-option-to-gcc-and-g
Just nice, and nothing gets stored in filesystem:
pi#raspberrypi400:~/memrun/C $ uname -a | g++ -O3 -Wall -run demo.cpp 42
bar 42
Linux raspberrypi400 5.10.60-v7l+ #1449 SMP Wed Aug 25 15:00:44 BST 2021 armv7l GNU/Linux
pi#raspberrypi400:~/memrun/C $
I have a Dreambox 500 which on Wikipedia says has a PCP processor which is PowerPC:
$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor: 0
cpu: STBx25xx
clock: 252MHz
Review: 9.80 (pvr 5151 0950)
bogomips: 250.36
Machine: Dream Multimedia Dreambox TV
plb bus clock: 63MHz
I would normally install GCC but it has low storage on it and I need to compile a program for it.
I've heard GCC can compile powerpc but I had no luck doing so.
Example this code
#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
printf("Hello World!\n");
return 0;
}
And I use this to compile
gcc example.c -mtune=powerpc
But it give this error
example.c:1:0 error: bad value (powerpc) for -mtune- switch
#include <stdio.h>
^
Thank you!
You should use cross-compiler, because your target architecture differs from host one. Host is the architecture of your system (usually amd64 (x86_64) or i386 (x86_32)). And target arch is the arch on which your compiled program will run (powerpc in your case).
Many GNU/Linux distors provide crosscompilers as a separate packages. For example, for Ubuntu these packages are available:
sudo apt-get install gcc-4.8-powerpc-linux-gnu g++-4.8-powerpc-linux-gnu binutils-4.8-powerpc-linux-gnu
Packages above are for trusty. In later releases different GCC versions are available.
Then you can compile your program using powerpc-linux-gnu-gcc-4.8. Or you can set your environment variables CC and CXX to powerpc-linux-gnu-gcc-4.8 and powerpc-linux-gnu-g++-4.8 accordingly.
upd:
I found crosscompiler toolchain for Dreambox 500 here, but it contains relatively old GCC (3.4).
In order to use it extract downloaded file to /opt/cross/dm500, add /opt/cross/dm500/cdk/bin to path via export PATH=$PATH:/opt/cross/dm500/cdk/bin and use gcc from here with appropriate prefix.
After being on a programming forum for a while, found a guy with the same problem, and after a while he found a way to fix it and I tried it and it works.
The thing I have to do is
powerpc-gcc someprog.c -static
I have no idea what the -static does but it increases the executable file size and at the end it works!