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Executable and Linkable Format (ELF) [pdf]
- bediger4000 11y agoThis is cool and stuff, but the real question is "what value does a super complicated format like ELF add?" I guess the same question could be posed about Mach-O or PE (a.k.a. COFF) executable file format. Seriously, ELF (and Mach-O) have all kinds of capabilities (Mach-O can specifiy starting multiple threads, rather than just giving an entry point) that compiler systems and programming languages will just never use. Why bother with such complexity? Note that I don't want to argue that we should have just stuck with a.out format, but rather that the formats mandated by custom and standard are just really complex, and have a lot of features that are never used, and just might cause real security problems (http://cs.dartmouth.edu/~bx/elf-bf-tools/slides/elf-defcon20.pdf http://cs.dartmouth.edu/~bx/elf-bf-tools/slides/elf-defcon20... and http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~sws/pubs/sbs13.pdf http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~sws/pubs/sbs13.pdf come to mind).