So I was reading Slashdot yesterday when I came across a link to this article which is basically a crash course in writing super small programs using assembly language (nasm in Linux). I was completely in awe of their acquired 45 byte executable and took it upon myself to learn the basics of assembly.
My first attempt was to write a hello world (the article writes a 45 byte executable that just returns the number 42). That worked super well and was as easy as I thought, so I decided to play around with a couple of more system calls and write a program that sends hello world to a file in /tmp/. There were a few errors that I came across, so I got some help from the friendly guys in #asm on freenode IRC and figured out the last part. Here is the code, and after it is an explanation of the two parts the screwed me up.
; tiny.asm BITS 32 org 0x08048000 ehdr: ; Elf32_Ehdr db 0x7F, "ELF", 1, 1, 1, 0 ; e_ident times 8 db 0 dw 2 ; e_type dw 3 ; e_machine dd 1 ; e_version dd _start ; e_entry dd phdr - $$ ; e_phoff dd 0 ; e_shoff dd 0 ; e_flags dw ehdrsize ; e_ehsize dw phdrsize ; e_phentsize dw 1 ; e_phnum dw 0 ; e_shentsize dw 0 ; e_shnum dw 0 ; e_shstrndx ehdrsize equ $ - ehdr phdr: ; Elf32_Phdr dd 1 ; p_type dd 0 ; p_offset dd $$ ; p_vaddr dd $$ ; p_paddr dd filesize ; p_filesz dd filesize ; p_memsz dd 5 ; p_flags dd 0x1000 ; p_align phdrsize equ $ - phdr _data: msg db "Hello, World!", 0xa len equ $ - msg file db "/tmp/test.out", 0x0 _start: ; create the file /tmp/test.out mov eax, 5 mov ebx, file mov ecx, 66 int 0x80 ; save the file descriptor mov ebx, eax ; set read/write permissions on the file mov eax, 94 mov ecx, 0x1ff int 0x80 ; write the string to the file mov eax, 4 ; mov ebx, 1 ; uncomment this to print to stdout instead mov ecx, msg mov edx, len int 0x80 ; close the file mov eax, 6 int 0x80 ; exit mov eax, 1 mov ebx, 0 int 0x80 filesize equ $ - $$
You can build and execute this yourself straight from Linux command line if you have nasm installed by saving it as tiny.asm and executing “nasm -f bin -o a tiny.asm && chmod +x a”. I have the ELF headers embedded directly into the assembly and we use ZERO external libraries so there is no linking needed. In fact, since pretty much everything executed is system calls, you can then run strace on the resultant executable (named “a”) and it will give you a pretty nice dump of exactly what it does.
The first thing that kind of tripped me up was when I created the file, it creates by default with no permission flags set at all. To fix this, I added an fchmod call right after I opened the file. The hex value I pass to as the second parameter (ecx) is just the hex value for 777 permissions. That set the permissions right but originally when I went to write to the file it still wouldn’t write. Thanks to the IRC help I figured out that when I was opening the file, I was opening with O_CREATE (62) when what I really wanted to do was open it with O_CREATE | O_RDWR so that I could write to it as well, so I changed the mode parameter of the call to open to 64 instead of 62 et voila, it works!
Hope you enjoy and maybe it’ll help somebody else out who is trying to write to a file with assembly in Linux.
DeMar.is 