Pwndbg: A GDB Plugin Designed for Security Vulnerability Analysis

About Pwndbg

Pwndbg is a GDB plugin specifically designed for security vulnerability analysis. This tool significantly simplifies the difficulty researchers face when using GDB for vulnerability analysis and debugging. It mainly focuses on the features required by software developers, hardware hackers, reverse engineers, and vulnerability analysts.

The original GDB is not suitable for reverse engineering and vulnerability development. Entering x/g30x $esp is not fun and does not provide much information. Therefore, pwndbg was born.

Pwndbg is a Python module that is loaded directly into GDB, providing a set of utilities and helper tools to solve all problems in GDB and eliminate rough edges.

Tool Installation

Since this tool is developed based on Python 3, we first need to install and configure the latest version of the Python 3 environment on the local device.

Next, researchers can directly use the following command to clone the project’s source code to their local machine:

git clone https://github.com/pwndbg/pwndbg.git

Then switch to the project directory and use the installation script provided by the tool to complete the installation of pwndbg:

cd pwndbg
./setup.sh

Or use the following command to build the latest version of pwndbg from the project source code:

cd <gdb-sources-dir>
mkdir build && cd build
sudo apt install libgmp-dev libmpfr-dev libreadline-dev texinfo  # required by build
../configure --disable-nls --disable-werror --with-system-readline --with-python=`which python3` --with-system-gdbinit=/etc/gdb/gdbinit --enable-targets=all
make -j7

Release Version Installation

We can also directly access the project’s Releases page to download the precompiled version of pwndbg for the corresponding system architecture (x86_64, armv7l, aarch64, riscv64).

Other Installations

Installation on RPM-based systems (CentOS/Alma/Rocky/RHEL):

dnf install ./pwndbg-2024.08.29.x86_64.rpm

# pwndbg

Installation on DEB-based systems (Debian/Ubuntu/Kali):

apt install ./pwndbg_2024.08.29_amd64.deb
# pwndbg

Installation on Alpine:

apk add --allow-untrusted ./pwndbg_2024.08.29_x86_64.apk
# pwndbg

Installation on Arch Linux:

pacman -U ./pwndbg-2024.08.29-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst
# pwndbg

General Linux installation:

tar -v -xf ./pwndbg_2024.08.29_amd64.tar.xz
# ./pwndbg/bin/pwndbg

Tool Operation Demonstration

Tool Configuration

Context View

Heap Memory Audit

Data Leak Identification

IDA Pro Integration

Information Search

License Agreement

The development and release of this project follow the MIT open source license agreement.

Project Address

Pwndbg：

https://github.com/pwndbg/pwndbg

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