gdbinit v7.4.4 – the skip command

Here is a small update to gdbinit with a new command, skip. This command will skip over the current instruction, without executing it. Usually I do it manually by set $pc=newvalue but this involves copy & paste and mouse movements and gets boring after a while. It’s great to skip over calls while you are trying some stuff and analysing some program behavior. By default it will not execute the command at the new address....

January 10, 2012 · 2 min · 223 words

How GDB disables ASLR in Mac OS X Lion

This isn’t a rocket science post but more like some notes for future reference 😄. Lion finally introduces full ASLR and GDB has the possibility to disable that feature when analyzing target binaries. A new GDB setting was added, disable-aslr, which allows to enable or disable this feature. By default this feature appears to be enabled (I am just looking at GDB source code) and it’s set by the variable disable_aslr_flag configured at gdb/macosx/macosx-tdep....

August 11, 2011 · 2 min · 344 words

gdbinit v7.4.2, Github and Twitter

Hello, It seems like things are very quiet and I only push gdbinit updates. Well, I have been very busy with very interesting projects, most of which can’t see yet the “light of the day”. Need to find some time to fool around with some new stuff. It seems that VMprotect is coming to OS X and that is exciting news. I hope they finish it soon since I am curious about Mac specific implementation and tricks....

August 11, 2011 · 2 min · 406 words

Update to GDB patches – fix for a "new" bug

I was messing around with SoftwarePassport and Amit Singh’s tiny executable to find out why GDB doesn’t breakpoint in those two executables. I thought it was due to incomplete headers, but GDB can’t also breakpoint into nicertiny, which has the segment/section added (otool/otx problems can be fixed by manually adding the missing section – there is enough padding space in the header to do that so SoftwarePassport developers might want to fix that)....

February 21, 2011 · 2 min · 228 words