ELF Shenanigans - Holiday Special

Did you know that it's possible to use ANSI color codes and emojis in the section names of yor ELF binaries? I didn't. So, I had to try, and objdump output has never been prettier. 🎄

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As hackers, we some times get a "what if I just..." moment. A delightful spark of inspiration and mischief that can not be ignored. I found my self pondering if it would be possible to put ANSI Codes into ELF section names. Could we perhaps replace .text section name with some color and spice in the output of objdump?

It turns out, that works like a charm and I have never seen a better looking symbol table!

The assembler complains about silly section names, but putting control characters in a linker script works just fine.

MEMORY {
  XMAS (rx) : ORIGIN = 0xDEC25000, LENGTH = 0x1000
}

SECTIONS
{
  "🎄 ^[[31;49m▓▒░^[[0m ^[[95;1;5m🌟^[[0m ^[[31m░▒▓^[[92;41;1mXMAS^[[31;49m▓▒░^[[0m ^[[95;1;5m🌟^[[0m ^[[31;49m░▒▓^[[0m 🎄" : {
    *(.text*)
  } > XMAS
}

ENTRY(xmas)

I've put some sample code over at github.com/4ZM/elf-shenanigans to reproduce the demo.

If you can't get enough of linker scripts or if you want to learn more about ELFs, my other article "A Simple ELF" might be helpful.

What else could we do to the objdump output? Multi-line ASCII art? Playing the terminal bell? Blinking text? Happy exploring, and happy holidays!

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