Memory Editors

[Ender]

For those of you familiar with memory editors such as ArtMoney on Windows, I have two questions:

1) Do you know of any free memory editors for linux?
2) Do you know how these memory editors work programmatically? I thought that a process is restricted to its own memory space. How does it access other processes' memory spaces? Can you shed any light on how to do this in C and/or assembly? And is it possible in C (forgetting inline asm) or is it only possible in assembly?

[iago]

in Windows, it reads memory using ReadProcessMemory and writes with WriteProcessMemory. I've never looked into how to do it on Linux since most stuff is opensource and, therefore, the discussion is irrelevant

[nslay]

For those of you familiar with memory editors such as ArtMoney on Windows, I have two questions:

1) Do you know of any free memory editors for linux?
2) Do you know how these memory editors work programmatically? I thought that a process is restricted to its own memory space. How does it access other processes' memory spaces? Can you shed any light on how to do this in C and/or assembly? And is it possible in C (forgetting inline asm) or is it only possible in assembly?

Write a program that opens (open(2)) /dev/mem (mem(4)) or /dev/kmem (kmem(4)) and do your worst.
You should probably run it as root.

This is always fun: dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/mem

[MyndFyre]

This is always fun: dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/mem

LOL

[iago]

Write a program that opens (open(2)) /dev/mem (mem(4)) or /dev/kmem (kmem(4)) and do your worst.
You should probably run it as root.

There's gotta be a way to edit processes without having to go through system memory. But the only IPC I've used on Linux/Unix was when I had control of both processes, so I didn't have to do anything special.

This is always fun: dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/mem

Using /dev/random would take forever, since it's needs constant entropy. You'd get more success with /dev/urandom

[Blaze]

Wouldn't that just replace your memory with random stuff?  Sounds like an adventure.. 

[Newby]

Yeah. I did that and now my Linux box refuses to boot.

I guess I should just install Windows on the box.

[Sidoh]

Haha, what?  Isn't /dev/mem supposed to be volatile?

[Joe]

His urandom probably had it in for him -- managed to make EIP point to the instructions offset_rm db "rm -rf /*",13,0    push offset_rm     call bash::execute or something.

I did cat /dev/urandom the other day at school. Almost everyone (including but not limited to the teacher) gave me an awkward stare, while Zagaroth just said "Joe, you're weird.."

[Newby]

His urandom probably had it in for him -- managed to make EIP point to the instructions offset_rm db "rm -rf /*",13,0    push offset_rm     call bash::execute or something.

Yeah because on a server that doesn't get used, that's somewhere in my memory.

[Joe]

It could be in your urandom somewhere, though.

[Skywing]

Writing garbage over physical memory seems like a great way to cause random disk corruption to me, espeically if you overwrite something being DMA'd or some memory mapped device registers.

[Newby]

Writing garbage over physical memory seems like a great way to cause random disk corruption to me, espeically if you overwrite something being DMA'd or some memory mapped device registers.

I figured there was some disk corruption that was the cause of it. I wonder if a fsck would fix it.

[nslay]

Writing garbage over physical memory seems like a great way to cause random disk corruption to me, espeically if you overwrite something being DMA'd or some memory mapped device registers.

I figured there was some disk corruption that was the cause of it. I wonder if a fsck would fix it.

Ah
I meant the dd thing as a joke, I didn't think anyone would actually want to crash their machine ...
Nonetheless, you might be able to boot a livecd and recover data from partitions still intact and run fsck on all of them.

[Newby]

Haha. I ran it as a joke because I never use the server. So .