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execve-type memory-based function, possible?

DISCUSSION Jørgen P. Tjernø 2 participants 3 messages Oct 23, 2006

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#0 lore raw

Hi!

I've recently been toying with methods for copy-protection and other esoteric subjects, for academic and hobby purposes, and I haven't found much info on this subject.

I want to see if it's possible (from userspace) to load and execute an ELF-binary based on a memory-buffer, i.e. load, relocate, etcetera (then execute) a program that's stored in memory.

I can't find any readily available options, I've toyed a bit with shmem (to get an fd) and fexecve, but haven't gotten far. I've briefly looked at the execve-code in the kernel.

So I'm curious; does anyone have any experience or suggestions on this subject? Is it at all possible to do the operations via usermode? I've toyed with creating copy-protection-schemes and binary packers and such under Win32, where it's possible, but I have no experience on the subject under Linux (or found any documentation on anyone else doing so).

Any papers, links, source-file-references etcetera would be appreciated. :-)

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Kindest regards / Med vennlig hilsen,
 Jørgen P. Tjernø
 <[email protected]>
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#1 lore raw
Quoted 1 line · Jørgen P. Tjernø

[ .. a lot of stuff .. ]

It might've been a bit unclear, so here goes:

I'm thinking something like if you read the contents of the file "/bin/ls" into a buffer, and then want to execute that. Wouldn't that require that you allocate the memory, do relocation, set the correct memory page protection (to execute for code, etc), etcetera?

Signature · 7 lines
Kindest regards / Med vennlig hilsen,
 Jørgen P. Tjernø
 <[email protected]>
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#2 lore raw
Quoted 9 lines · Jørgen P. Tjernø
Quoted 1 line · Jørgen P. Tjernø

[ .. a lot of stuff .. ]

It might've been a bit unclear, so here goes:

I'm thinking something like if you read the contents of the file "/bin/ls" into a buffer, and then want to execute that. Wouldn't that require that you allocate the memory, do relocation, set the correct memory page protection (to execute for code, etc), etcetera?

Jørgen,

(now I got it) Looks like you'd want to implement some kind of userland exec. In this case the following archive will be useful:
http://www.graegert.com/code/ul_exec-v1.1.tar.gz. Although quite dated it illustrates basic concepts.

If you have questions about the code or the general approach, feel free to contact me privately.

\Steve

--

Steve Grägert <[email protected]>
Jabber xmpp://[email protected]
Internet http://eth0.graegert.com, http://blog.graegert.com
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