mandiant / mandiant/capa

embedded pe: offsets are virtual addresses rather than file offsets

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#2,745 1 comment 1 reaction 0 assignees View on GitHub

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binary-ninja bug ghidra ida
Dominant language
Python
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Description

`characteristic: embedded pe` is a file-scoped feature, and therefore i think its intended that the associated address is a file offset.

pefile and viv backends extract file offsets correctly.

but IDA, Ghidra, and BN currently extract virtual addresses (and possibly mis-label them as file offsets.

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Research direction

Inspect the IDA, Ghidra, and BN backends where embedded PE addresses are extracted, then compare their behavior with the pefile and viv backends. Verify whether each backend reports file offsets rather than virtual addresses, and confirm the resulting characteristic data is labeled consistently.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
python
Domain
reverse-engineering
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
45/100

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