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Goblin

An impish, cross-platform binary parsing crate, written in Rust

Install / Use

/learn @m4b/Goblin
About this skill

Quality Score

0/100

Supported Platforms

Universal

README

libgoblin

Actions crates.io version

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Documentation

https://docs.rs/goblin/

changelog

Usage

Goblin requires rustc 1.85.0 (Rust 2024 edition).

Add to your Cargo.toml

[dependencies]
goblin = "0.10"

Features

  • awesome crate name
  • zero-copy, cross-platform, endian-aware, ELF64/32 implementation - wow!
  • zero-copy, cross-platform, endian-aware, 32/64 bit Mach-o parser - zoiks!
  • PE 32/64-bit parser - bing!
  • a Unix and BSD style archive parser (latter courtesy of [@willglynn]) - huzzah!
  • many cfg options - it will make your head spin, and make you angry when reading the source!
  • fuzzed - "I am happy to report that goblin withstood 100 million fuzzing runs, 1 million runs each for seed 1~100." - @sanxiyn
  • tests

libgoblin aims to be your one-stop shop for binary parsing, loading, and analysis.

Use-cases

Goblin primarily supports the following important use cases:

  1. Core, std-free #[repr(C)] structs, tiny compile time, 32/64 (or both) at your leisure.

  2. Type punning. Define a function once on a type, but have it work on 32 or 64-bit variants - without really changing anything, and no macros! See examples/automagic.rs for a basic example.

  3. std mode. This throws in read and write impls via Pread and Pwrite, reading from file, convenience allocations, extra methods, etc. This is for clients who can allocate and want to read binaries off disk.

  4. Endian_fd. A truly terrible name :laughing: this is for binary analysis like in panopticon or falcon which needs to read binaries of foreign endianness, or as a basis for constructing cross platform foreign architecture binutils, e.g. cargo-sym and bingrep are simple examples of this, but the sky is the limit.

Here are some things you could do with this crate (or help to implement so they could be done):

  1. Write a compiler and use it to generate binaries (all the raw C structs have Pwrite derived).
  2. Write a binary analysis tool which loads, parses, and analyzes various binary formats, e.g., panopticon or falcon.
  3. Write a semi-functioning dynamic linker.
  4. Write a kernel and load binaries using no_std cfg. I.e., it is essentially just struct and const defs (like a C header) - no fd, no output, no std.
  5. Write a bin2json tool, because why shouldn't binary formats be in JSON?
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Cfgs

libgoblin is designed to be massively configurable. The current flags are:

  • elf64 - 64-bit elf binaries, repr(C) struct defs
  • elf32 - 32-bit elf binaries, repr(C) struct defs
  • mach64 - 64-bit mach-o repr(C) struct defs
  • mach32 - 32-bit mach-o repr(C) struct defs
  • pe32 - 32-bit PE repr(C) struct defs
  • pe64 - 64-bit PE repr(C) struct defs
  • te - Terse Executable (TE) repr(C) struct defs
  • archive - a Unix Archive parser
  • endian_fd - parses according to the endianness in the binary
  • std - to allow no_std environments

Maintainers

  1. PE: @kkent030315
  2. Elf: @m4b, open for applications
  3. Mach-o: @m4b, open for applications

Maintainers are first contact reviewers for that particular backend. They are chosen based on prior contributions, activity, base knowledge, and amicable and gregarious behavior :D

Currently, I (@m4b) only have merge rights for all PRs. In the future it is likely, that the maintainer(s) for that given backend will also have merge rights as well.

Lastly, I will still likely give cursory reviews to all PRs, but will mostly/entirely default to the maintainer for that backend.

And always remember the wisdom of Bill and Ted: "Be excellent to each other!"

Contributors

Thank you all :heart: !

In lexicographic order:

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[@wi

Related Skills

View on GitHub
GitHub Stars1.5k
CategoryDevelopment
Updated2d ago
Forks194

Languages

Rust

Security Score

100/100

Audited on Apr 5, 2026

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