CODEWITHSUNDEEP
macosgdb
Yichin
Yichin

Reputation: 1

gdb on OSX unable to recognize 32bit unstripped ELF

This gdb was installed via Homebrew on my OSX.
I wonder why gdb doesn't work on this file(I was playing pwn)on my OSX, while I can run it on Kali linux through VirtualBox. I saw some people mentioned "Apple version gdb", is that the problem?
And how do I solve this?
I searched for answer quite a while and even asked my proffessor, please give me a hand!

➜ file bof
bof: ELF 32-bit LSB shared object, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), 
dynamically linked, interpreter /lib/ld-linux.so.2, for GNU/Linux 2.6.24, 
BuildID[sha1]=ed643dfe8d026b7238d3033b0d0bcc499504f273, not stripped

➜ gdb bof
GNU gdb (GDB) 8.0
Copyright (C) 2017 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later
<http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>
.
.
.
"/Users/me/Desktop/test/bof": not in executable format: File     format not recognized
(gdb)

Upvotes: 0

Views: 383

Answers (1)

Tom Tromey
Tom Tromey

Reputation: 22539

This gdb was installed via Homebrew on my OSX.

...

bof: ELF 32-bit LSB shared object, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, interpreter /lib/ld-linux.so.2, for GNU/Linux 2.6.24,

There are many ways to configure gdb. The default -- if you don't pass any special options to configure -- is to configure in just what is needed for the host platform.

In this case, probably what has happened is that your gdb is configured for OSX -- meaning Mach-O and not ELF -- and so gdb can't read ELF files. You can test this theory by typing set gnutarget <TAB> <TAB> at the gdb prompt (the tabs will cause completion, which is the only way I know of to list what was compiled in here). Alternatively, you can try show configuration, though that just says what options were passed to configure, and so it needs interpretation.

One simple way to get out of this is to reconfigure with --enable-targets=all. Then gdb will be able to read ELF files and other things as well.

Upvotes: 2

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