Get available library functions at runtime - c++

I am working with dynamic linked libraries (.dll) on windows or shared objects (.so) on Linux.
My goal is to write some code, that can - give the absolute path of the library on the disk - return a list of all exported functions (the export table) of that library and ultimately be able to call those functions. This should work on windows (wit dll) as well as on Linux (with so).
I am writing kind of a wrapper that delgates function calls to the respective library. Therefore I receive a path, a function name, and a list of parameters which I then want to forward. the thing is: I want to know whether the given function exists before trying to call it
From here I found a platform-independent way of opening and closing the library as well as getting a pointer to the function with the given name.
So the thing that remains is getting the names of available functions in the first place.
On this topic, I found this question dealing with the same kind of problem only that it asks for a Linux specific solution. In the given answer it is said
There is no libc function to do that. However, you can write one yourself (or copy/paste the code from a tool like readelf).
This clearly indicates that there are tools to do what I am looking for. The only question is, is there one that can work on windows as well as on Linux? If not how would I go about this on my own?
Here is a C# implementation (actually this is the code I want to port to C++) doing what I want (though windows only). To me, this appears as if the library structure is handled manually. If this is the way to go then where can I find the necessary information on the library structure?

So, on unixoids (and both Linux and WinNT have a posix subsytem), the dlopen function can be used to load a dynamic library and get function pointers to known symbols by name of that symbol.
Getting a list of symbols as far as I know was never an aspect that POSIX bothered to specify, so long story short, the functions that can do that for you on Linux are specific to the libc used there (GNU libc, mostly), and on Windows to the libc used there. Portable code means having to different codebases for two different libcs!
If you don't want to depend on your libc, you'd have to have a binary object parser (for ELF shared libraries on Linux, PE on Windows) to read out symbol names from the files. There's actually plenty of those – obviously, WINE has one for PE that is portable (especially works on Linux as well), and every linker (including glibc's runtime linker) under Linux can parse ELF files.
Personally, radare2 is a fine reverse-engineering framework with plenty of language bindings that is actually meant to analyze binary files, and give you exported symbols (as well as being capable of extracting non-exported functions, constructing call-graphs etc). It does have debugger, i.e. jumping-into-functions capabilities, too.

So, knowing now that
I am writing kind of a wrapper that delgates function calls to the respective library. Therefore I receive a path, a function name, and a list of parameters which I then want to forward. the thing is: I want to know whether the given function exists before trying to call it
things become way easier: you don't actually need to get the list of exports. It's easier and just as fast to simply try.
So, on any POSIX system (and that includes both Windows' POSIX subsystem and Linux), dlopen will open the library and load the symbol table, and dlsym will look up a symbol from that table. If that symbol is not in the table, it simply returns NULL. So, you already have all the tables you think you need; just not explicitly, but queryable.

Related

linux and shared libraries and different g++ compilers

What is the story regarding having a process on Linux, which dlopen() multiple shared libraries and the executable and/or the shared libraries compiled with different C++ compilers (e.g. provided by customers or 3rd parties).
Am I going right in the following assumptions:
there is only a single namespace for symbols in a linux process. Symbols are found and resolved only by symbol name. The source of the symbol is random in the presence of an unknown executable (customer supplied) or customer supplied shared libraries.
there is no way to make certain, that STL/boost symbols are being resolved from the correct source, as they are always weak and thus might be overwritten.
What are the implications of using multiple copies of (different) libc++ inside the same process (some of them static)?
I don't expect seperate libraries to be able to talk to each other via a C++ interface but only via a C interface. What I would like is, that one can load SharedLibraries from different vendors into a single process and they do not screw up each other.
I know that this has worked in Windows for decades
Your comment completely changes your question:
I don't expect it to be able to talk to each other via a C++ interface but only via a C interface. What I expect is, that one can load SharedLibraries from different vendors into a single process and they do not screw up each other. (This btw is working on Windows since decades)
This element of behaviour is largely system indipendant. The Windows PE format and Linux ELF are similar enough in design that they don't add any additional constraints or capabilities on this topic. So if your technique was going to work in Windows then it should also do so in Linux, just replacing .dll files for .so files.
Linux has more standardisation around calling conventions than Windows, so if anything you should find that Linux make's this simpler.
Origional Answer
Question:
there is only a single namespace for symbols in a Linux process?
That's correct; there's no such thing as namespaces in Linux's loader.
As you may know, C and C++ are very different languages. C++ has namespaces C does not. When libraries are loaded (in both Linux, Unix and also Windows) there is no concept of namespace.
C++ compilers use name mangling to ensure that names isolated by namespaces in your code, do not compiled when placed as symbols in the shared object. C compilers don't do this and don't need to do it because there are no namespaces.
Question:
Symbols are found and resolved only by symbol name. The source of the symbol is random in the presence of an unknown executable (customer supplied) or customer supplied shared libraries.
Let's replace the word "random" for unpredictable. That's also correct. From Wikipedia:
The C++ language does not define a standard decoration scheme, so each compiler uses its own. C++ also has complex language features, such as classes, templates, namespaces, and operator overloading, that alter the meaning of specific symbols based on context or usage. Meta-data about these features can be disambiguated by mangling (decorating) the name of a symbol. Because the name-mangling systems for such features are not standardized across compilers, few linkers can link object code that was produced by different compilers.
Question:
What is the story regarding having a process on LINUX, which dlopen() multiple shared libraries and the executable and/or the shared libraries compiled with different C++ compilers (e.g. provided by customers or 3rd parties).
You can off course dlopen() a shared object, but dlsym() would be tricky to use because of name mangling. You'd have to inspect the shared object manually to determine the precise symbol name.
What are the implications of using multiple copies of (different) libc++ inside the same process (some of them static)?
If you got that far, then I'd be concerned about memory management first of all. libc++ is responsible for implementing new and delete and converting these into memory requests from the OS. If they behave anything like GNU's malloc() and free(), they might manage their own pool of memory. It'd be hard to prectict what would happen if you called delete on an object that was created by a different libc++.
it seems that parts of this randomness can be avoided by loading the shared libraries using the following flags passed to dlopen():
RTLD_LOCAL
RTLD_DEEPBIND

Finding static function address in linux library

I need to find address of a static function in a linux library for hooking.
I tried using dlopen() and dlsym() but it didn't work.
Is there any way to find it? Or how to iterate through library's memory so I can do a pattern scanning?
Unless there is an entry in the library's export table, you will have to do some reverse engineering to discover where it is (if it was compiled as what could be identified as a single function in the first place, that is).
Unfortunately, there seems to be no such entry. If you have the source code, you could try compiling just that function into a separate binary using your best guess for whatever options were used with the module of interest -- at least you'd have a pattern to try matching.

loading multiple similar shared libraries on linux

I am working on code that creates 'models'. A model is created from an XML file and part of its representation is, generated on the fly, C code. This C code is compiled, on the fly, into a shared library that is dynamically loaded (using POCO shared lib class). The shared library mainly contains small functions, and part of a models creation is to populate function pointers to these functions. All this works fine. However, creating several models, at the same time, causes problems.
I believe it has to do with how the dynamic loading works on Linux, and the fact that each shared library contain functions with identical names. Does PIC cause this? The problems manifest itself in no sense data being retrieved from shared libraries functions.
So question is, how to load multiple (thousands) shared libraries, containing identical function names, on linux?
The above works fine on windows, where it seems that dynamically loaded libraries data/functions are kept perfectly isolated from each other.
Poco SharedLibrary open function accepts linker flags. Default is Poco::SharedLibrary::SHLIB_GLOBAL, corresponding to dlopens RTLD_GLOBAL and Poco::SharedLibrary::SHLIB_LOCAL, corresponding to RTLD_LOCAL. See http://linux.die.net/man/3/dlopen for more info.
Passing the Poco::SharedLibrary::SHLIB_LOCAL flag fixed the problem.
First, you can dlopen many hundreds of thousands of shared objects. My manydl.c demonstrate that.
Then, you can also generate C code, compile it, and dlopen the shared object, all this from the same process. My (obsolete in 2017) MELT plugin (for GCC, MELT provides a high level language to extend GCC) does that (and so does my manydl.c example).
However, I don't think you should keep identical (defined) function names in them. I suggest avoiding that. You could
generate unique names (since the C code is generated, this is the best, most portable, and simplest solution)
compile with some -D flags to #define these names to unique names, so the source code could apparently contain duplicate names; that is if your generated code defines the foo function pass a -Dfoo=foo_123 (with foo_123 being globally unique) to the gcc command compiling it. (Of course you then dlsym for "foo_123").
add visibility("hidden") function attributes in your generated code. You could also pass -fvisibility=hidden option to gcc.
have only static functions (then, the name don't matter much so can be duplicate), and have a constructor function which somehow binds the functions (e.g. store their pointer somewhere, e.g. in some global table).
you might consider passing RTLD_LOCAL to dlopen(3). I'm not sure it is a good idea (and POCO probably don't know how to do that).
PS. I don't think it is related to position independent code (which is preferable, but not absolutely required, in shared objects; without -fPIC the dlopen would have to do a lot of inefficient relocations). It is related to Linux shared object linking & loading. Read Levine's Linkers & Loaders book for details.
See also this question, and read Drepper's paper on How to Write Shared Libraries.

Hide or remove unwanted strings from windows executable release

I have this habit always a C++ project is compiled and the release is built up. I always open the .EXE with a hexadecimal editor (usually HxD) and have a look at the binary information.
What I hate most and try to find a solution for is the fact that somewhere in the string table, relevant (at least, from my point of view) information is offered. Maybe for other people this sounds like a schizophrenia obsession but I just don't like when my executable contains, for example, the names of all the Windows functions used in the application.
I have tried many compilers to see which of them published the least information. For example, GCC leaves all this in all of its produced final exe
libgcj_s.dll._Jv_RegisterClasses....\Data.ald.rb.Error.Data file is corrupt!
....Data for the application not found!.€.#.ř.#.0.#.€.#.°.#.p.#.p.#.p.#.p.#.
¸.#.$.#.€.#°.#.std::bad_alloc..__gnu_cxx::__concurrence_lock_error.__gnu_cxx
::__concurrence_unlock_error...std::exception.std::bad_exception...pure virt
ual method called..../../runtime/pseudo-reloc.c....VirtualQuery (addr, &b, s
ize of(b))............................/../../../gcc-4.4.1/libgcc/../gcc/conf
ig/i386/cygming-shared-data.c...0 && "Couldn't retrieve name of GCClib share
d data atom"....ret->size == sizeof(__cygming_shared) && "GCClib shared data
size mismatch".0 && "Couldn't add GCClib shared data atom".....-GCCLIBCYGMI
NG-EH-TDM1-SJLJ-GTHR-MINGW32........
Here, you can see what compiler I used, and what version. Now, a few lines below you can see a list with every Windows function I used, like CreateMainWindow, GetCurrentThreadId, etc.
I wonder if there are ways of not displaying this, or encrypting, obfuscating it.
With Visual C++ this information is not published. Instead, it is not so cross-platform as GCC, which even between two Windows systems like 7 and XP, doesn't need C++ run-time, frameworks or whatever programs compiled with VC++ need. Moreover, the VC++ executables also contain those procedures entry points to the Windows functions used in the application.
I know that even NASM, for example, saves the name of the called Windows functions, so it looks like it's a Windows issue. But maybe they can be encrypted or there's some trick to not show them.
I will have a look over the GCC source code to see where are those strings specified to be saved in the executables - maybe that instruction can be skipped or something.
Well, this is one of my last paranoia and maybe it can be treated some way. Thanks for your opinions and answers.
If you compile with -nostdlib then the GCC stuff should go away but you also lose some of the C++ support and std::*.
On Windows you can create an application that only links to LoadLibrary and GetProcAddress and at runtime it can get the rest of the functions you need (The names of the functions can be stored in encrypted form and you decrypt the string before passing it to GetProcAddress) Doing this is a lot of work and the Windows loader is probably faster at this than your code is going to be so it seems pointless to me to obfuscate the fact that you are calling simple functions like GetLastError and CreateWindow.
Windows API functions are loaded from dlls, like kernel32.dll. In order to get the loaded API function's memory address, a table of exported function names from the dll is searched. Thus the presence of these names.
You could manually load any Windows API functions you reference with LoadLibrary. The you could look up the functions' addresses with GetProcAddress and functions names stored in some obfuscated form. Alternately, you could use each function's "ordinal" -- a numeric value that identifies each function in a dll). This way, you could create a set of function pointers that you will use to call API functions.
But, to really make it clean, you would probably have to turn off linking of default libraries and replace components of the C Runtime library that are implicitly used by the compiler. Doing this is a hasslse, though.

Catching calls from a program in runtime and mapping them to other calls

A program usually depends on several libraries and might sometimes depend on other programs as well. I look at projects like Wine and think how do they figure out what calls a program is making?
In a Linux environment, what are the approaches used to know what calls an executable is making in runtime in order to catch and map them to other calls?
Any code snippets or references to resources for extra reading is greatly appreciated :)
On Linux you're looking for the LD_PRELOAD environment variable. This will load your libraries before any requested by the program. If you provide a function definition that matches one loaded by the target program then your version will be called instead.
You can't really detect what functions a program is calling however. You can however get all the functions in a shared library and implement all of those. You aren't really catching the functions, you are simply reimplementing them.
Projects like Wine do this in some cases, but not in all. They also rewrite some of the dynamic libraries. So when a Win32 loads some DLL it is actually loading the Wine version and not the native version. This is essentially the same concept of replacing the functions with your own.
Lookup LD_PRELOAD for more information.