checksec.py

Checksec tool in Python, Rich output, based on LIEF

Demo

Table of Contents

• Overview
• Requirements
• Setup
  • Windows
  • Linux
• Usage
• FAQ
• References
• License
• Contributors

Overview

A simple tool to verify the security properties of your binaries.

These properties can be enabled by your compiler to enforce the security of your executables, and mitigate exploits. However it can be challenging to apply them on a whole system.

Check the level of security your Linux distro / Windows release is providing you !

Supported formats:

• ELF
• PE
• Mach-O

Based on:

• Rich: Beautiful terminal output formatting
• LIEF: Cross-platform library to parse, modify and abstract ELF, PE and Mach-O formats

Requirements

• Python 3.6
• virtualenv

Setup

Windows

You find the checksec.exe on the latest Github releases:

Linux

virtualenv -p python3 venv
source venv/bin/activate
(venv) pip install checksec.py

Usage

(venv) checkec <file_or_directory>...

Check --help for more options (JSON output, recursive walk, workers count)

FAQ

1. checksec is slow on some huge binaries ! What's happening ?!

checksec.py relies on the LIEF library to parse PE/ELF/MachO formats.

➡️The library doesn't offer at this point on-demand parsing, so it will parse and fetch unecessary data.

➡️Retrieving symbols can be slow (ex: pandoc, 118M, +300 000 symbols, +2m 20sec). See this issue

2. I sent a CTRL-C to cancel checksec.py processing, the app doesn't want to quit

checksec.py is working with multiple process workers to parallelize its execution and binary processing. When a CRTL-C is received, checksec.py will wait for them to stop.

Sometimes, this is not working, and I don't know why at this point. You can kill the remaining Python workers afterwards.

References

• @apogiatzis Gist checksec.py
• checksec.sh
• winchecksec

License

Contributors