ELF Parser Project

Hey, what’s up?

Why This Project?

After finishing the static analysis of the Hello World binary (with some parts still left), I needed a break. But I don’t want to stop learning.

While I was studying the hello world binary, I felt something was missing: a clear, C-style view of the entire ELF structure. I wanted to see actual structs with spec-defined types, populated with values parsed directly from a real binary.

I have found a project called pax-utils, from GNU Project, which has a utility named dumpelf. And i decided that I will explore ELF spec myself by extracting raw bytes from an elf file and dump the values in a C-style format.

I began this project on 24/07/2025 with one goal in mind. I have to build a tool which can parse a Hello World ELF binary on x86_64. That’s it.

I used readelf as a reference throughout this process as it is too easy to get lost in raw bytes without a guide.

The language would be C.

Here is the project repository, GitHub.