Katana

Introduction

Katana is an ELF and DWARF manipulation shell, largely in the spirit of ERESI. It was originally developed as a hot-patching tool and work on it was continued for research into security implications of the DWARF debugging and exception-handling format. Much of its functionality is either for patching or for DWARF data manipulation, but it is designed underneath as a general-purpose ELF manipulation framework which can be extended as need be for other purposes

Katana aims to provide a hot-patching system for userland. Further it aims to work with existing toolchains and formats so as to be easy to use and to hopefully pave the way for incorporating patching as a standard part of the toolchain. Because of this aim, Katana operates at the object level rather than requiring any access to the source code itself. This has the added bonus of making it, in theory, language agnostic (although no work has been done to test it with anything besides programs written in C).

Documentation

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Downloads can be found here. The same files can also be found at Sourceforge.

git clone git://git.savannah.nongnu.org/katana.git

Project Page

Related

• DWARF Trojans: Presentations about the security of DWARF, with demonstrations using Katana, were given at Shmoocon and Hackito Ergo Sum in 2011. Materials from these talks can be found here
• Hot-Patching Research/Results: A paper about our hot-patching system was published in the International Journal of Secure Software Engineering Vol 1 Issue 3

Authors and Contact

Licensing

The complete text of this license may be found in the file COPYING distributed with the Katana source code.

Katana is free software: you may redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. Regardless of which version is chose, the following stipulation also applies:

Any redistribution must include copyright notice attribution to Dartmouth College as well as the Warranty Disclaimer below, as well as this list of conditions in any related documentation and, if feasible, on the redistributed software; Any redistribution must include the acknowledgment, "This product includes software developed by Dartmouth College," in any related documentation and, if feasible, in the redistributed software; and The names "Dartmouth" and "Dartmouth College" may not be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software.

WARRANTY DISCLAIMER

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