Introduction¶

The purpose of this project is to provide a cross platform library which can parse, modify and abstract ELF, PE, MachO and Android formats.

Main features:

• Parser: LIEF can parse ELF, PE, MachO, DEX, OAT, ART and VDEX. Moreover it provides an user-friendly API to access format internals.

• Modify: LIEF enables to modify some parts of these formats.

• Abstract: Usually formats have common features like sections, symbols, entry point… LIEF tries to provide an abstraction over these characteristics.

• API: LIEF can be used in C++, Python and, to a lesser extent, in C

The global architecture looks like this:

In the architecture, each format has its own namespace, parser and builder. The parser takes a binary, library… as input and decomposes in LIEF object. For instance, the ELF format has segments, so ELF::Parser will parse segments to create ELF::Segment. In the ELF::Binary class we will have a list of ELF::Segment which can be modified (change type, size, content…). Then the ELF::Builder will transform ELF::Binary into a valid executable.