Prologue

There are many posts out there explaning this mechanism, and while they are good, most of them focus on the exploitation part of the PLT and GOT and thus don’t explain glibc’s role in the process My goal here isn’t to explain the whole implementation of this mechanism in glibc, but rather provide key insights and direction to give a detailed yet overally complicated understanding of the process.

Any assembly here will be x86_64 AT&T syntax, but it’s the same gist for different architectures as well.

Disclaimer:

1. The targeted audience of this document is dynamic linker & loader implementors, so important information for other tools (such as linkers and compilers) might be missing.

2. This writeup is DEFINITELY not a substitute for the original document. It is highly recommended to read the original document before reading this summary. I wrote it to help me understand the document better, and to be able to reference things quickly if I forget something. It would be very hard to understand this mechanism without reading the original document first.