Question

Continuing my reverse engineering education I’ve often wanted to be able to copy portions of x86 assembly code and call it from a high level language of my choice for testing.

Does anyone know of a method of calling a sequence of x86 instructions from within a C# method? I know that this can be done using C++ but I’m curious if it can be done in C#?

Note: I’m not talking about executing MSIL instructions. I’m talking about executing a series of raw x86 assembly instructions.

Answer 1

Just to counter Brian’s claim, rewritten code from leppie’s answer link:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;

namespace DynamicX86
{
    class Program
    {
        const uint PAGE_EXECUTE_READWRITE = 0x40;
        const uint MEM_COMMIT = 0x1000;

        [DllImport("kernel32.dll", SetLastError = true)]
        static extern IntPtr VirtualAlloc(IntPtr lpAddress, uint dwSize, uint flAllocationType, uint flProtect);

        private delegate int IntReturner();

        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            List<byte> bodyBuilder = new List<byte>();
            bodyBuilder.Add(0xb8);
            bodyBuilder.AddRange(BitConverter.GetBytes(42));
            bodyBuilder.Add(0xc3);
            byte[] body = bodyBuilder.ToArray();
            IntPtr buf = VirtualAlloc(IntPtr.Zero, (uint)body.Length, MEM_COMMIT, PAGE_EXECUTE_READWRITE);
            Marshal.Copy(body, 0, buf, body.Length);

            IntReturner ptr = (IntReturner)Marshal.GetDelegateForFunctionPointer(buf, typeof(IntReturner));
            Console.WriteLine(ptr());
        }
    }
}