Eric Sauer
Eric Sauer

Reputation: 870

View/Edit File Headers

I'm conducting reserach on malformed archives and this one exploit ( CVE-2012-1459 ) talkes about manipulating the header information of the archive. I have a rough understanding of all of this and would like to clear it up.

  1. Every file has header information that contains byte length and other simular stuff?

  2. If the above is incorrect. What is a header?

  3. How is it possible to view/edit this information?

( Any information about headers is helpfull. Information online is not clear )

Upvotes: 2

Views: 11563

Answers (1)

Wug
Wug

Reputation: 13196

Many file formats have headers. If you wanted to look at the headers for a specific file, the best option would be to grab a thorough documentation of the format, a hex editor, a calculator that does hex to dec and vice versa conversions, and a notepad for sketching stuff on. Oftentimes, they are fairly in depth and have many levels of indirection, and understanding exactly how they fit together is fairly daunting. Some files may have many nested headers. Archives are an example: they typically have one header with information about the entire archive, and headers inside, one for each file, with details about the contents.

Upvotes: 1

Related Questions