pe-parse is a principled, lightweight parser for Windows portable executable files. It was created to assist in compiled program analysis, potentially of programs of unknown origins. This means that it should be resistant to malformed or maliciously crafted PE files, and it should support questions that analysis software would ask of an executable program container. For example, listing relocations, describing imports and exports, and supporting byte reads from virtual addresses as well as file offsets.

pe-parse supports these use cases via a minimal API that provides methods for

• Opening and closing a PE file
• Iterating over the imported functions
• Iterating over the relocations
• Iterating over the exported functions
• Iterating over sections
• Iterating over resources
• Reading bytes from specified virtual addresses
• Retrieving the program entry point

The interface is defined in parser-library/parse.h.

The program in dump-pe/main.cpp is an example of using the parser-library API to dump information about a PE file.

Internally, the parser-library uses a bounded buffer abstraction to access information stored in the PE file. This should help in constructing a sane parser that allows for detection of the use of bogus values in the PE that would result in out of bounds accesses of the input buffer. Once data is read from the file it is sanitized and placed in C++ STL containers of internal types.

pe-parse can be installed via vcpkg:

pe-parse includes Python bindings via pepy, which can be installed via pip:

More information about pepy can be found in its README.

ICU is required on non-Windows platforms (Linux, macOS). You do not need ICU on Windows.

• ICU library (International Components for Unicode)
  • Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install libicu-dev
  • RedHat/Fedora: sudo dnf install libicu-devel
  • macOS: brew install icu4c
  • vcpkg: vcpkg install icu

• Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install cmake
• RedHat/Fedora: sudo yum install cmake
• OSX: brew install cmake
• Windows: Download the installer from the CMake page

VS 2017, VS 2019, VS 2022, and VS 2026 are supported.

When ICU is installed via brew it will not be in the usual library path, so you will need to set the ICU_ROOT environment variable to the location where ICU is installed when running cmake.

The path is usually /opt/homebrew/opt/icu4c@version, where version is the version number of ICU you have installed.

You can build the (catch2-based) tests by adding -DPEPARSE_ENABLE_TESTING=ON during CMake configuration. Build, and then run with ctest or cmake --build . --target test.

To run the full test suite with the Corkami test suite, you must clone the submodule with git submodule update --init.

You can build the included examples by adding -DPEPARSE_ENABLE_EXAMPLES=ON during CMake configuration.

If you are familiar with C++ sanitizers and any specific development environment requirements for them (compiler, instrumented standard library, etc.), you can choose to compile with any of the following sanitizers: Address, HWAddress, Undefined, Memory, MemoryWithOrigins, Leak, Address,Undefined.

For example, to compile with both Address and Undefined sanitizers, use the following (recommended for development and testing, and tested in CI):

Once the library is installed, linking to it is easy! Add the following lines in your CMake project:

You can see a full example in the examples/peaddrconv folder.

pe-parse was designed and implemented by Andrew Ruef, with significant contributions from Wesley Shields.

pe-parse is currently maintained by Eric Kilmer and Graham Sutherland.