[jbangert]

I built a (research) library a few years ago to rewrite ELF binaries; our research projects ran into a lot of limitations with doing incremental patches to a binary (ELF has a lot of redundant representations of the same data). For us, parsing the binary into a normalized representation, modifying that, and re-serializing worked — we could make more intrusive changes to the binary, and (almost? I don’t recall anything breaking) everything in the Debian repos still ran after the binaries has been rewritten.

I expect the library is now woefully out of date, and documentation is mostly in the form of conference talk slides:

https://github.com/jbangert/mithril

there’s also https://github.com/aclements/libelfin (parsing only, supports dwarf); https://github.com/bx/elf-bf-tools (Turing machine inside elf relocations) and of course the “olg guard” of ELF reversing tools ERESI/elfsh (website seems down; GitHub mirror on https://github.com/thorkill/eresi).