mandiant / mandiant/capa

Add support for ELF Core dumps

Open
#784 2 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

enhancement
Dominant language
Python
Stars
6.2k
Forks
726
Avg merge
11d 11h
Merged PRs (30d)
7

Description

Summary

Would it be possible to add support for ELF core dump files, as created by gcore, gdb etc.

Motivation

Ability to analyse dumped process memory on Linux. Helping to investigate code injection.

Describe alternatives you've considered

Currently capa provides an error message "Input file does not appear to target a supported OS" when trying to run it against a core dump. Modified the e_type field to either ET_EXEC / ET_DYN in the executable header of a core file to see if it enabled to capa to run. This didn't work either.

Additional context

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Reproduce the reported failure by running capa against an ELF core dump and trace the input-format handling that emits the unsupported-OS error. Review how executable files are currently recognized, then define the required core-dump support and tests that demonstrate capa can analyze Linux process-memory dumps.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
linux, python
Domain
operating-systems, reverse-engineering
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
35/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.