postject VS libear

My team is working on this problem in the context of creating Node.js single-executable applications. While the naive approach of just appending data at the end of the binary works, it is not friendly with code-signature in macOS and Windows given that signing operates on PE and Mach-O sections.

We have recently open-sourced a small tool called Postject (https://github.com/postmanlabs/postject), which is able to inject arbitrary data as proper ELF/Mach-O/PE sections for all major operating systems (with AIX support coming). The tool also provides C/C++ cross-platform headers for easily traversing the final binary and introspect whether the segment is present or not.

The tool is based on the LIEF (https://github.com/lief-project/LIEF) project.

At Postman, we are making use of this on our custom Node.js single-executable applications and soon on our custom Electron.js builds too.

The BBC did a lot of work in this area (disclaimer: I worked for them), including creating an open source renderer: https://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2019-08-libear-ebu-audio-renderer-next-generation-open-source. The code is here: https://github.com/ebu/libear. Start at https://github.com/ebu/libear/blob/master/examples/objects_gains.cpp and work back through the code.

My colleague wrote this solution for C++ and cmake:

https://github.com/ebu/libear/commit/40a4000296190c3f91eba79...

This is a cmake function which generates C++ files using no external tools. It's probably not very fast, but if you don't need to handle big files and are already using cmake this is easy to integrate, adds no dependencies and works on all platforms.