1 unstable release
0.3.0 | Apr 30, 2024 |
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#7 in #gadget
79KB
1K
SLoC
inspector-gadget
A cli-based, multi-architecture gadget-finding tool, designed for fast operation, even with large binaries like browser engines and OS kernels.
Main Features
- Detects and parses PE/COFF, ELF, and Mach-O object files to pull architecture, endianness, and executable section/segment flags.
- Support for arm, arm64, x86, x86_64, mips, mips64, ppc, ppc64, riscv, riscv64, sparc64, and s390x/systemz architectures.
- Located gadgets are de-duplicated, with all load addresses for a given gadget listed in the output.
- Built-in regex engine for pre-filtering mnemonics of gadget results.
- Configurable gadget instruction counts and ending instructions.
- It's fast.
Usage
The minimal invocation of inspector-gadget
is very simple:
inspector-gadget /usr/bin/grep
inspector-gadget
's default behavior is to:
- Parse the input binary, which is assumed to be an object file.
- Find every gadget in sections and segments marked as executable, by default finding only gadgets ending with a return instruction.
- De-duplicate the gadgets.
- Print to
stdout
the gadget mnemonic and the list of start addresses for each unique gadget that was found.
Changing Output Destination
Use the -o
(--out-file
) flag:
inspector-gadget -o gadgets.txt /usr/bin/grep
Alternatively, the gadgets get written to stdout
, but progress messages get
written to stderr
, so just redirecting the output to a file will also result
in the gadgets getting written to a file:
inspector-gadget /usr/bin/grep > gadgets.txt
Filtering Gadgets
To make the initial filtering easier, or to make working with binaries that
have smaller file sizes take fewer steps, inspector-gadget
supports
filtering the resulting gadget mnemonics using regular expressions via
@burntsushi's excellent regex library.
When working with binaries that have larger file sizes, I recommend finding
all gadgets matching a loose set of constraints, writing them to a file, then
grepping that file repeatedly to find anything specific you might be looking
for. If you want a similarly-performant grep
implementation, I recommend
ripgrep (also written by @burntsushi),
which can be obtained via cargo install
or through the package manager on most
linux distros (or brew
on mac).
Use the -r
(--regex-str
) flag:
inspector-gadget -r "^pop rdx;.*pop r[a-z1-589]{1,3}; ret" /usr/bin/grep
Note: each gadget's mnemonic is separated by "; "
, so consider that when
constructing any regex patterns.
Changing Gadget Length Constraints
By default, inspector-gadget
will find gadgets containing between 2 and 10
instructions. If you'd like to change these bounds, use the --min-insns
and
--max-insns
flags:
inspector-gadget --min-insns 4 --max-insns 6 /usr/bin/grep
Changing Gadget Ending Instructions
By default, inspector-gadget
will only search for gadgets ending with
whatever instruction are used for a function return for the given architecture.
If you'd like to also allow terminating indirect jumps or terminating indirect
calls, use the --allow-terminating-call
or --allow-terminating-jmp
flags:
inspector-gadget --allow-terminating-call /usr/bin/grep
Note: this works great for architectures that have obvious distinctions between instructions that are used for jmp/call/ret, but is less effective or non-functional for RISC architectures that re-use the same instructions for control flow. I've manually implemented heuristics for return instructions for each architecture, but if call/jmp instructions aren't specifically tagged by Capstone for your target architecture, I haven't gone back through and done separate ones myself.
Manually-Specifying Architecture and Endianness
By default, inspector-gadget
will parse the object file passed as input in
order to determine the correct architecture and endianness to use during
disassembly. If you'd like to specifying these values manually, use the
--arch
and --endianness
flags:
inspector-gadget --arch x86_64 --endianness little /usr/bin/grep
If --arch
or --endianness
flags are passed, the manually-specified values
will be used instead of the values parsed from the object file.
Using Raw Binary Data as Input
If you'd like to use raw data as input, use the --raw-binary
flag:
inspector-gadget --arch x86_64 --raw-binary /tmp/grep_text_dump.bin
Note: when using --raw-binary
, the binary's architecture and endianness
must be specified manually. Endianness will default to little-endian if the
--endianness
flag is not passed, as it is significantly more common.
--arch
must always be passed when using --raw-binary
.
Implementation Details
inspector-gadget
is built on the
Capstone disassembly framework, and
supports gadget-finding for every available Capstone disassembly
architecture. The disassembly and gadget-finding process is heavily
multithreaded using a work queue of pre-calculated search start addresses
and the rayon data-parallelism library.
After using Capstone to find valid gadgets, inspector-gadget
uses a
custom tree-based data structure to de-duplicate any gadgets that can be
found at multiple addresses within the binary.
Up until this point, the mnemonic strings for the gadgets' instructions
haven't been accessed or stored anywhere, so inspector-gadget
then uses
Capstone to disassemble all of the unique gadgets that have been found and
generate their final mnemonic strings.
Due to the short length of the gadgets and the significantly smaller number of operations required when compared to the original search, this second disassembly pass both saves a significant amount of memory usage and is significantly faster than if the mnemonic strings had been stored during the initial pass.
inspector-gadget
also implements object file parsing for the PE/COFF,
ELF, and Mach-O file formats, as well as support for raw input blobs.
Further Documentation
Documentation is available on docs.rs.
Functions and structures are all commented using Rust's doc comments, so
rust doc
should generate pretty good documentation.
Performance
On my test box, it takes less than 10 seconds to find every gadget in an
Android arm64 build of libmonochrome.so
, the dylib used by Chrome and the
Android system webview:
time target/release/inspector-gadget test_bins/libmonochrome_64.so > /dev/null
[...]
real 0m9.758s
The next-best option was Ropper, which took about 35 minutes and didn't bother de-duplicating or sorting the gadgets that it found.
A Windows x86_64 build of xul.dll
, the Firefox dylib, took about a minute and
a half to process:
time target/release/inspector-gadget test_bins/xul.dll > /dev/null
[...]
real 1m25.907s
I gave up waiting on an actual number from Ropper after about 3 hours, but anecdotally it used to be a "run it overnight" sort of problem.
When targeting smaller binaries, results are near-instant:
time target/release/inspector-gadget test_bins/apple-mfi-fastcharge.ko
[...]
real 0m0.113s
TODO(garnt): collect better data and make some graphs.
License
inspector-gadget
is licensed under GPLv3.
Dependencies
~49MB
~1.5M SLoC