Practical Binary Analysis

4BUILDING A BINARY LOADER USING LIBBFD

Now that you have a solid understanding of how binaries work from the previous chapters, you’re ready to start building your own analysis tools. Throughout this book, you’ll frequently build your own tools that manipulate binaries. Because nearly all of these tools will need to parse and (statically) load binary files, it makes sense to have a common framework that provides this ability. In this chapter, let’s use libbfd to design and implement such a framework to reinforce what you’ve learned so far about binary formats.

You’ll see the binary loading framework again in Part III of this book, which covers advanced techniques for building your own binary analysis tools. Before designing the framework, I’ll ...