GTIRB Pretty Printer

A pretty printer from the GTIRB intermediate representation for binary analysis and reverse engineering to gas-syntax assembly code.

Building

The pretty-printer uses C++17, and requires a compiler which supports that standard such as gcc 7, clang 6, or MSVC 2017.

To build and install the pretty printer, the following requirements should be installed:

• GTIRB.
• Capstone. We use our own fork https://github.com/GrammaTech/capstone/tree/v5 which at the moment is equivalent to the official release.
• Boost, version 1.67.0 or later.
  • Requires the libraries:
    • filesystem
    • program_options
    • system

Note that these versions are newer than what your package manager may provide by default: This is true on Ubuntu 18, Debian 10, and others. Prefer building these dependencies from sources to avoid versioning problems.

Use the following options to configure cmake:

• You can tell CMake which compiler to use with -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=<compiler>.
• Normally CMake will find GTIRB automatically, but if it does not you can pass -Dgtirb_DIR=<path-to-gtirb-build>.
• gtirb-pprinter can make use of GTIRB in static library form (instead of shared library form, the default) if you use the flag -DGTIRB_PPRINTER_BUILD_SHARED_LIBS=OFF.
• Furthermore, if you want to produce a gtirb-pprinter executable that links statically, specify -DGTIRB_PPRINTER_STATIC_DRIVERS=ON.
• You can configure CMake to use a custom location for Capstone by specifying -DCMAKE_LIBRARY_PATH=<path-to-capstone>.
• You can use vcpkg on Windows to provide some dependencies by passing -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=<path-to-vcpkg\scripts\buildsystems\vcpkg.cmake>.

Once the dependencies are installed, you can configure and build as follows:

cmake ./ -Bbuild
cd build
make

Installing

See the GTIRB readme.

Usage

Generate reassembleable assembly code

Pretty print the GTIRB for a simple hello world executable to an assembly file named hello.S, assemble this file with the GNU assembler to an object file named hello.o, and link this object file into an executable.

gtirb-pprinter hello.gtirb --asm hello.S
as hello.S -o hello.o
ld hello.o -o hello
./hello

Generate a new binary

The --binary flag to gtirb-pprinter generates a new binary by calling gcc directly.

gtirb-pprinter hello.gtirb --binary hello

This option admits an argument --library-paths or -L to specify additional paths where libraries might be located.

For example:

gtirb-pprinter hello.gtirb --binary hello -L . -L /usr/local/lib

Dummy .so

In some cases, it is desirable to rebuild a dynamically linked ELF executable without any of the libraries to which it is linked (e.g., if rebuilding an executable from another system).

Normally, the linker needs to have the libraries in order to link with them. However, the --dummy-so option generates fake libraries that contain the required symbols used by the binary, which is sufficient for running the linker. An example is shown:

gtirb-pprinter hello.gtirb --binary hello --dummy-so=yes

AuxData Used by the Pretty Printer

Generating assembly depends on a number of additional pieces of information beyond the symbols and instruction/data bytes in the IR. The pretty printer expects this information to be available in a number of AuxData objects stored with the IR. We document the expected keys along with the associated types and contents in this table.

AuxData Used by the Binary Printer

In order to generate new binaries, gtirb-binary-printer also uses the following tables: