IDA Pro: Program parameters

Question

I am currently playing around with simple buffer overflows in a C program and I am trying to understand the program by stepping through it in IDA Pro.

The program takes an argument and writes it into a buffer with strcpy(). I can pass a simple argument like AAAA... to the program in IDA Pro (Debugger->process options) and see how the return address gets overwritten.

What I would like to do now is pass some shellcode as a parameter and see in IDA Pro how the program writes the shellcode in the buffer and overwrites the return address.

In a shell, I would execute something like:

$ ./vuln \`perl -e 'print "\x55\x89\xe5..."'`

or

$ ./vuln \`cat shellcode.txt`

So my question is: how can I pass non-printable characters as an argument to a program in IDA Pro?

Answer 1

Try using IDC function StartDebugger. You can pass a C-style string (e.g. "\x55\x89\xe5")for program arguments:

***********************************************
** Launch the debugger
   arguments:
        path - path to the executable file.
        args - command line arguments
        sdir - initial directory for the process
for all args: if empty, the default value from the database will be used
   returns: -1-failed, 0-cancelled by the user, 1-ok
   See the important note to the StepInto() function

long StartDebugger(string path, string args, string sdir);