mobile-shell / mobile-shell/mosh

Investigate -pie vs -Wl,-pie on OS X

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bug good first issue OS X security
Dominant language
C++
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Description

[from a blog comment]

I believe for Mac OS X you need to use -Wl,-pie even with gcc. If you use gcc -v when linking on Mac OS X you won't see -pie being passed to the linker. Here's the output of otool -h on an executable built with -pie in LDFLAGS on Mac OS X 10.6:

Mach header
magic cputype cpusubtype caps filetype ncmds sizeofcmds flags
0xfeedfacf 16777223 3 0x80 2 11 1776 0x00000085

Compare that to one built with -Wl,-pie

Mach header
magic cputype cpusubtype caps filetype ncmds sizeofcmds flags
0xfeedfacf 16777223 3 0x80 2 11 1776 0x00200085

In /usr/include/mach-o/loader.h we find this:

#define MH_PIE 0x200000 /* When this bit is set, the OS will
load the main executable at a
random address. Only used in
MH_EXECUTE filetypes. */

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Research direction

Reproduce the two linking cases on OS X and compare the otool -h output, using the reported gcc -v behavior as a starting point. Read /usr/include/mach-o/loader.h for the MH_PIE definition; done means the effect of -pie versus -Wl,-pie and any required project change are established.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
cpp, macos
Domain
build-system, security
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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