Python bindings for Intel's XED

huku <[email protected]>

About

pyxed is a Python extension that uses Intel's XED library to decode x86 instructions. It is designed to be a wrapper around XED's C API and, as such, it doesn't provide any high level abstractions.

Compiling pyxed

Linux & MacOS X

The pyxed build process is based on setuptools and should work on both Python 3.x and Python 2.x, even though the latter is obsolete.

Begin by cloning pyxed and its dependencies:

$ git submodule update --init --recursive

Create a new virtual environment for installing and testing:

$ python -m venv /tmp/pyxed-venv               # Python 3.x
$ virtualenv --python=python2 /tmp/pyxed-venv  # Python 2.x

Build and install pyxed:

$ . /tmp/pyxed-venv/bin/activate
$ python setup.py build
$ python setup.py install

And, last but not least, make sure everything works as expected:

$ pip install pytest
$ pytest tests/

Notes on MacOS X

Compiling on MacOS X requires the XCode command line utilities to be installed.

Depending on the XED version, you might get the following error when trying to import pyxed in your project.

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
ImportError: dlopen(pyxed.so, 2): Library not loaded: obj/libxed.dylib
  Referenced from: pyxed.so
  Reason: unsafe use of relative rpath obj/libxed.dylib in pyxed.so with restricted binary

This is a problem related to hardcoded rpath values in Intel's libxed.dylib. To fix it, run the following command after substituting /path/to/libxed.dylib with the actual path of libxed.dylib in your filesystem.

$ otool -L pyxed.so | grep libxed.dylib
    obj/libxed.dylib
$ install_name_tool -change obj/libxed.dylib /path/to/libxed.dylib pyxed.so

Microsoft Windows

Compiling on Microsoft Windows requires Visual Studio to be installed.

First set PYTHON27_PREFIX and XED_PREFIX in Makefile.nmake to the location of Python and XED on your system accordingly. Then, run the following commands to build a 32-bit binary:

C:\pyxed> "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\VC\vcvarsall.bat"
C:\pyxed> nmake /F Makefile.nmake

Or the following to build a 64-bit binary:

C:\pyxed> "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\VC\vcvarsall.bat" amd64
C:\pyxed> nmake /F Makefile.nmake

In newer versions of Visual Studio you might need to replace the amd64 argument with x86_amd64.

Compiling for use with IDAPython

To use pyxed with IDAPython, make sure you link the first with the appropriate Python version.

For example, on my MacOS X system, IDAPython runs on Python 2.6.x:

Python>sys.version
2.6.7 (r267:88850, Oct 11 2012, 20:15:00)
[GCC 4.2.1 Compatible Apple Clang 4.0 (tags/Apple/clang-418.0.60)]

To make pyxed work correctly I had to replace python2.7-config with python2.6-config in Makefile.

Using pyxed

For information on how to use pyxed, have a look at examples/.

If your compiler throws a warning, if you happen to hit a bug, or if you have any comments or suggestions please let me know.

Links

• XED source code
• XED documentation