moria-c 0.0.6

A library for manipulating in-memory C data structures

Moria

A library for interacting with in-memory C structures. With Moria, you can:

• Extract C struct information from compiled binaries (using DWARF debug info)
• Turn them into high-level python types
• Manipulate values including nested structs, pointers, and arrays
• Serialize into binary compatbile with the original program
• Pack objects into a binary buffer
• Automatically arrange string buffers, etc. in memory
• Automatically compute pointer values in packed objects

Why?

Data-only memory corruption exploits can involve reading and writing complex data structures in the target address space. Moria makes development of these types of exploits much easier.

Examples

Moria can manipulate complicated in-memory C datastructures using high-level python objects. For example, take the following C declaration for a linked list of user data:

struct user
{
    int id;
    char name[MAX_USERNAME_LEN];
    struct user *prev;
    struct user *next;
};

Moria can automatically extract the types, sizes, and offsets of the structure from binary compiled with debug info:

with open("uesrlist.bin", "rb") as binary:
    structs = DwarfParser(binary).parse()

user1 = structs.user()
user2 = structs.user()

You can set field values, including nested types and pointers that reference other objects, fields, or values:

user1.id = 1
user1.name = "alice"
user1.next = user2.ref()
user1.prev = user2.ref()

user2.id = 2
user2.name = "bob"
user2.next = user1.ref()
user2.prev = user1.ref()

Finally, you can pack your collection of objects into a byte array, automatically computing pointer values using a base address, ready to be injected into the target address space!

start_address = 0x560A61DF4000 # e.g. heap address
packed = namespace.pack_values(start_address, 0x1000, [user1, user2])

The result:

0000560a61df4000  01 00 00 00 61 6c 69 63  65 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |....alice.......|
0000560a61df4010  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
0000560a61df4020  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  38 40 df 61 0a 56 00 00  |........8@.a.V..|
0000560a61df4030  38 40 df 61 0a 56 00 00  02 00 00 00 62 6f 62 00  |8@.a.V......bob.|
0000560a61df4040  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
0000560a61df4050  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
0000560a61df4060  00 40 df 61 0a 56 00 00  00 40 df 61 0a 56 00 00  |.@.a.V...@.a.V..|

See Also

1. Connor, Richard J. III, Improved Architectures for Secure Intra-process Isolation. PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2021. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/6533
2. proc/mem attack