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  • 2 min read

Release 0.8 - Chutoro Nigiri

Hello, debuggers! It's been a while since our last release, but we are excited to announce libdebug version 0.8, codename 🍣 Chutoro Nigiri 🍣. This release brings several new features, improvements, and bug fixes. Here is a summary of the changes:

Features

  • Process/Thread Snapshots & Diffs: Take snapshots of the execution state of the debuggee and compare them across different points in time.
  • Multiprocessing Support: Automatically manage child processes created via fork(), attaching new debuggers to them. This behavior can be customized with the Debugger parameter follow_children.
  • Find References Between Memory Maps: Introduced d.memory.find_pointers to identify all pointers in a memory region that reference another region, useful for detecting memory leaks in cybersecurity applictions.
  • SIGTRAP Signal Handling: Now it is possible to catch SIGTRAP signals, excluding those directly related to debugging, exposing only unrecognized signals from the process or external sources.
  • Defaulted Fast Memory Access (fast_memory=True): Improves performance of memory access. Can be disabled using the fast_memory parameter in Debugger.
  • New Terminal Autodetection for d.gdb(open_in_new_process=True): Ensures GDB opens correctly in a newly detected terminal without user-defined commands.
  • Automatic Symbol Resolution for Unspecified Backing Files: When no specific file is set, symbols are resolved for all memory maps, with a warning due to potential performance impact.

Other Improvements

  • Migration from CFFI to Nanobind.
  • Refined Exception Handling: Standardized across the codebase for improved consistency.
  • Improved IDE Support: Enhancements to improve autocompletion and code suggestions.
  • Exposed zombie attribute in ThreadContext: Allows users to check if a thread is a zombie.

Bug Fixes

  • Fixed Memory Leaks: Resolved multiple leaks across various libdebug modules.
  • Fixed SymbolList Slicing: Properly supports slice operations.
  • Improved debuginfod Handling: Enhanced caching logic when a file is not available on debuginfod, improving compatibility with other binaries that use debuginfod on your system.
  • Fixed Resource Access Issues After Detach.
  • Resolved Object Collisions in Event Handling: Addressed key-collision issues in event-related objects (e.g., SyscallHandler, SignalCatcher).
  • Fixed Binary Path Resolution: Prevents incorrect binary paths in certain edge cases.
  • Improved d.gdb for Edge Cases: Fixed several inconsistencies in execution.
  • Fixed step, finish, and next Operations in Callbacks: Now executed correctly.
  • Enhanced Stability & Performance Optimizations.

Testing & CI

  • CI Support for arm64 & Ubuntu 24.04: Improved compatibility and test automation.

Documentation

  • Added Documentation for New Features.
  • Updated Contributing Guidelines.
  • Fixed Broken Links & Missing Pydocs.
  • Added Reference to Published Research Poster at a Top Conference.

New Contributors

  • 1 min read

See you at ACM CCS 2024!

We are excited to announce that we will be presenting a poster on libdebug at the 2024 ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ACM CCS 2024). The conference will be held in Salt Lake City, Utah. The poster session is October 16th at 16:30. We will be presenting the rationale behind libdebug and demonstrating how it can be used in some cool use cases.

If you are attending the conference, please stop by our poster and say hello. We would love to meet you and hear about your ideas. We are also looking forward to hearing about your research and how libdebug can help you in your work. Come by and grab some swag!

Link to the conference: ACM CCS 2024
Link to the poster information: libdebug Poster Link to the proceedings: ACM Digital Library

  • 1 min read

A New Documentation

Hello, World! Thank for using libdebug. We are proud to roll out our new documentation along with version 0.7.0. This new documentation is powered by MkDocs and Material for MkDocs. We hope you find it more intuitive and easier to navigate.

We have expanded the documentation to cover more topics and provide more examples. We also tried to highlight some common difficulties that have been reported. Also, thanks to the mkdocs search plugin, you can more easily find what you are looking for, both in the documentation and pages generated from Pydoc.

We hope you enjoy the new documentation. If you find any mistakes or would like to suggest improvements, please let us know by opening an issue on our GitHub repository.