Fuzzball: Support for the PE format?

[Thomas Peterson]

Can this tool support other formats than the ELF format? More specifically, can it handle the microsoft PE format?

I looked into the README.options but haven't been able to find any option to interpret a binary as using the PE format. And when simply feeding fuzzball with an exe file it complains that it is not an elf binary..

Any ideas?

[Stephen McCamant]

>>>>> "TP" == Thomas Peterson <pythonps...@gmail.com> writes:

TP> Can this tool support other formats than the ELF format? More
TP> specifically, can it handle the microsoft PE format?

TP> I looked into the README.options but haven't been able to find any
TP> option to interpret a binary as using the PE format. And when
TP> simply feeding fuzzball with an exe file it complains that it is
TP> not an elf binary..

[Also answered as a GitHub issue]

No, the limitation you might have been suspecting is real: at the
moment ELF is only binary format that FuzzBALL has any knowledge of.

FuzzBALL's knowledge of ELF is mostly found in
execution/linux_loader.ml, which is about 650 lines of code; it also
knows a bit about Linux process startup. A roughly similar amount of
new code would be needed to support Windows/PE binary loading.

If all you really care about is loading the code and static data from
a binary into FuzzBALL's simulated memory, another approach might be
to dump the state of a loaded process using some other tool, and then
convert it to the TEMU state format taken by FuzzBALL's "-state"
format. However this probably wouldn't be much easier overall.

The other thing that lets FuzzBALL symbolically execute Linux (x86-32,
x86-64, ARM-32) binaries is that FuzzBALL knows how to simulate many
common system calls: this is execution/linux_syscalls.ml. At more like
5400 lines of code, this would be a larger investment in
reimplementing for Windows.

Hope this helps,

-- Stephen