pe-parse is a principled, lightweight parser for windows portable executable files. It was created to assist in compiled program analysis, potentially of programs of unknown origins. This means that it should be resistant to malformed or maliciously crafted PE files, and it should support questions that analysis software would ask of an executable program container. For example, listing relocations, describing imports and exports, and supporting byte reads from virtual addresses as well as file offsets.
The interface is defined in `parser-library/parse.h`. The program in `dump-prog/dump.cpp` is an example of using the parser-library API to dump information about a PE file.
Internally, the parser-library uses a bounded buffer abstraction to access information stored in the PE file. This should help in constructing a sane parser that allows for detection of the use of bogus values in the PE that would result in out of bounds accesses of the input buffer. Once data is read from the file it is sanitized and placed in C++ STL containers of internal types.
PE files that have a Resource section with strings for the Type are encoded in UTF-16, but that `std::string` expects UTF-8. Some cross-platform solution
is desired. You can let cmake choose one it finds in your build environment or you can choose one from the following options yourself and specify it with
the `-DUNICODE_LIBRARY` argument when generating the project files with cmake:
*`icu` (preferred) - "[ICU](http://site.icu-project.org/) is a mature, widely used set of C/C++ and Java libraries providing Unicode and Globalization support for software applications"
*`codecvt` - A C++ library header file ([now deprecated](http://open-std.org/JTC1/SC22/WG21/docs/papers/2017/p0618r0.html)) supported by some C++ runtimes
pe-parse was designed and implemented by Andrew Ruef (andrew@trailofbits.com), with significant contributions from [Wesley Shields](https://github.com/wxsBSD).
