Learning Linux Binary Analysis

Chapter 3. Linux Process Tracing

In the last chapter, we covered the internals of the ELF format and explained its internal workings. In Linux and other Unix-flavored OSes that use ELF, the ptrace system call goes hand in glove with analyzing, debugging, reverse engineering, and modifying programs that use the ELF format. The ptrace system call is used to attach to a process and access the entire range of code, data, stack, heap, and registers.

Since an ELF program is completely mapped in a process address space, you can attach to the process and parse or modify the ELF image very similarly to how you would do this with the actual ELF file on disk. The primary difference is that we use ptrace to access the program instead of using the open/mmap/read/write ...