Insanely Low-Level

I bet some of you have always wanted to use a system dll file which has a few exported functions, though by ordinal numbers only. Yesterday it happenned to me. I had a dll which exported many a function by ordinal. For instance, you can take a look yourself at ws2_32.dll to learn quickly using dependency walker or another tool the exports of this file. Sometimes you have a 3rd party dll file which you lack both the header file (.h) and a .lib file. And let’s say that you know which functions (their ordinals) you want to use and their prototypes (which is a must). There are several approaches to use the dll in that case.

1) Use LoadLibrary and GetProcAddress programmatically to control the load and pointers retrieval for the functions you’re interested in. This is like the number one guaranteed way to work. I don’t like this idea, because sometimes you are bound to use the library as it is already linked to the file at link-time. Another disadvantage I find important is that you have to change your code in order to support that 3rd party dll functinoality. And for me this is out of question. The code should stay as it is nevertheless the way I use outsider dlls. And besides, why to bother add extra code for imported functions when the linker should do it for you?

2) Use delay-load dll’s, but you will still have to use some helper functions in order to import a function by its ordinal. If you ask me, this is just lame, and probably you don’t need a lazy load anyway.

3) Patching your PE file manually to use ordinals instead of function names. But there’s a catch here, how can you compile your file, if you can’t resolve the symbols? Well, that depends on the support your 3rd party dll has. For example, you might have a .lib file for one version of the 3rd party dll and then everything is splendid. But with a newer version of that dll, all symbols are exported by ordinals. So you can still compile your code using the older .lib, but then you will have to patch the PE. Well, this is the way I did it the first time yesterday, only to witness that everything works well. But even if you change your code slightly and recompile it you will have to fix the PE again and again. This is out of question. And besides you don’t solve a solution with atomic bomb when you can use a small missle, even if you have the skills to do that, something it’s possibly wrong and you should look for a different way, I believe this is true for most things in life anyway.

4) Using IMPORTS statement in your .def file. Which there you tell the linker how to resolve the symbols and everything. Well, this sounds like the ultimate solution, but unforetunately, you will get a linker warning: “warning LNK4017: IMPORTS statement not supported for the target platform; ignored”. Now you ask yourself what target platform are you on? Of course, x86, although I bet the feature is just not supported, so don’t go that way. The thing is that even Watcom C supports this statement, which is like the best thing ever. It seems that Visual C has supported it for sometime, but no more. And you know what’s worse? Delphi: procedure ImportByOrdinal; external MyLib index Ordinal; When I saw that line I freaked out that VS doesn’t have support for such a thing as well, so cruel you say.

5) And finally the real way to do it. Eventually I couldn’t manage to avoid the compiler tools of VS anymore and I decided to give them a try. Which I gotta say was a pleasant move, because the tools are all easy to use and in 10 mins I finished hacking the best solution out there, apparently…

It all comes down to the way you export and import functions. We all know how to export functions, we can use both dllspec(dllexport) or use a .def file which within we state which symbols to export, as simple as that. Of course, you could have used dllspec(dllimport) but that is only when you got a symbolic name for your import.

So what you have to do is this, write a new .def file which will export (yes, export) all the functions you want to import! but this time it’s a bit more tricky since you gotta handle specially the symbolic names of the imports, I will get to that soon. An example of a .def file that will import from ‘ws2_32.dll’ is this:

LIBRARY ws2_32.dll

EXPORTS

    MyAnonymousWSFunction @ 555

That’s it. We have a function name to use in our code to access some anonymous function which is exported by the ordinal 555. Well but that ain’t enough, you still need to do one more thing with this newly created .def file and that is to create a .lib file out of it using a tool named  ‘lib’: lib /DEF:my.def /OUT:my.lib

Now you got a new .lib file which describes the imports you want to use in your original PE file. You go back to that code and add this new ‘my.lib’ file in the linker options and you’re done.

Just as a tip, you can use ‘dumpbin /exports ida.lib’ in order to verify your required symbols.

We can now understand that in order to import symbols, VS requires a .lib file (and in order to export you need a .def file). The nice thing about it is that we can create one on our own. However, as much as we wish to use a .def file to import symbols too, it’s impossible.

One or two more things you should know. The linker might shout at you that a symbol __imp__blabla is not found. That does NOT mean you have to define your symbol with a prefix of __imp__. Let’s stick to demangled names, since I haven’t tried it on C++ names and it’s easier sticking to a simple case.

For cdecl calling convention you add a prefix of ‘_’ to your symbol name. For stdcall calling convention you don’t add any prefix nor suffix. But again, for stdcall you will have to instruct the linker how many bytes on stack the function requires (according to the prototype), so it’s as simple as the number of params multiplied by 4. Thus if you got a prototype of ‘void bla(int a, int* b);’ You will define your symbol as ‘bla@8 @ 555′. Note that the first number after the @ is the number of bytes, and the second one is the ordinal number, which is the most important thing around here.

And one last thing you should know, if you want to import data (no cdecl nor stdcall that is) you have to end the symbol’s line with ‘DATA’. Just like this: ‘MyFunc @ 666 DATA’.

I am positive this one gonna save some of you guys, good luck.