Take a binary and make changes to it (without breaking anything unintentionally). E.g. add hooks for performance measurements, add additional security checks, make it use/not use specific CPU instructions.
Could this tool be used to produce eg a statically-linked version of `curl` that would work the same on any Linux, without needing to build curl from sources?
> Painless relocation of Linux binaries–and all of their dependencies–without containers.
> Exodus handles bundling all of the binary's dependencies, compiling a statically linked wrapper for the executable that invokes the relocated linker directly.
It does not appear that "static binary rewriter" in this context means that it turns dynamically linked binaries into statically linked binaries, so probably not.
Same meaning as in a "static analyzer" for code quality: it works without executing the target program. (whereas a dynamic rewriter could run the application under debugger control, observe its behavior, extract additional meaning from that and make changes on-the-fly)
I imagine it means that it takes the binary file, generates a new binary file, and is done, as opposed to rewriting things at runtime or needing profiling information from a prior run of the binary.
This is correct. Specifically, there's a category of tool called "dynamic binary translators" (including Pin, DynamoRIO, Valgrind, and QEMU) that translate binary code one block at a time, just before it's executed.
