IDA Free: How to patch a memory address

Question

I have a disassembly line showing:

lea rcx, Format

In which Format is a memory address named by IDA. The address is at 0x1400132E0 and points to a C-String "hello, my dear\n".

What I want to do is to patch the address of Format to 0x1400132E1 so that the string would become "ello, my dear\n". However, Edit->Patch Program->Assembly does not allow operand such as [0x1400132E1]. What can I do?

Answer 1

I have never used IDA free but the documentation I found is mostly pointed towards supporting only IBM PC

Currently, only the IBM PC processors provide an assembler, nonetheless, plugin writers can extend or totally replace the built-in assembler by writing their own.

So your option is only to assemble and patch bytes since IDA Free doesn't support plugins.

Example

.text:000000000000063A                      ; int __cdecl main(int argc, const char **argv, const char **envp)
.text:000000000000063A                      public main
.text:000000000000063A                      main proc near
.text:000000000000063A 55                   push    rbp
.text:000000000000063B 48 89 E5             mov     rbp, rsp
.text:000000000000063E 48 8D 3D 9F 00 00 00 lea     rdi, s          ; "hello, my dear"
.text:0000000000000645 E8 C6 FE FF FF       call    _puts           ; Call Procedure
.text:000000000000064A B8 00 00 00 00       mov     eax, 0
.text:000000000000064F 5D                   pop     rbp
.text:0000000000000650 C3                   retn                    ; Return Near from Procedure
.text:0000000000000650                      main endp

It shows that the actual instruction bytes are

48 8D 3D 9F 00 00 00

which translate to

48 8d 3d 9f 00 00 00     lea    rdi,  [rip+0x9f]

You can then select the instruction you want to edit and then go to Hex-View > Press F2 to edit bytes and change to

48 8d 3d a0 00 00 00     lea    rdi,  [rip+0xa0]

Press F2 again to apply changes to db which would take disassembly to

.text:000000000000063E 48 8D 3D A0 00 00 00 lea     rdi, s+1        ; "ello, my dear"

Then Edit>Patch Program> Apply patches to input file to push changes back to original file.

TLDR : Assemble using other tool and change bytes in IDA Free. I use rasm or pwntools asm for quick testing otherwise keystone

[/tmp] rasm2 -a x86 -b 64 "lea rdi, [rip+0xa0]"
488d3da0000000
[/tmp] asm -c amd64 "lea rdi, [rip+0xa0]"
488d3da0000000

Answer 2

Edit -> Patch Program -> Assembly is not the best choice because it does not work for all processors and all instructions. I agree with sudhackar, but you can also use Edit -> Patch Program -> Change byte... to change the relative address (in your case it will 4th byte).