Fun with someone's strcat

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Fred

Joined: 22 Oct 2010
Posts: 39

Fred

Someone here on this forum came up with some strcat proc, so I grabbed it and made it into a macro for unicode strings instead.

Code:

macro strcatW dest,src{
local .get_str_len,.store_str

    pusha
    mov esi,dest
    mov edx,-2

.get_str_len:
    lodsw
    add edx,2
    test ax,ax ;test al,al ;cmp al,0
    jne .get_str_len

    mov esi,src
    mov edi,dest
    add edi,edx

.store_str:
    lodsw
    stosw
    test ax,ax
    jnz .store_str
  
    popa}

One thing i'm not sure about is "cmp al,0". I changed this to ax because unicode strings uses two bytes, but I'm not sure if my logic holds up (pretty new to asm). Not sure which one of cmp and test is better in this case, just trying out different things mostly.

Anyway, not satisfied with the low haxxor techniques required for that, I tried to play around some. (also, I just found out about movs.)

Code:

macro strcatW2 dest,src{
local .get_str_len

    mov esi,dest
    mov ecx,-2

.get_str_len:
    lodsw
    add ecx,2
    test ax,ax
    jne .get_str_len

    mov esi,src
    mov edi,dest
    add edi,ecx
    rep movsw}

(pusha/popa was removed since i didn't need them inside the macro)
Rad! It works! But I wanted to play around a little more, now that I'm starting to get the hang of basic asm.

Code:

macro strcatW3 dest,src{
local .get_str_len

    mov edi,dest
    mov esi,src
    mov ecx,-2 ;is _e_cx needed/does it matter?

.get_str_len:
    test di,di
    inc di
    add ecx,2
    ;test di,di   ;both these "test di,di" works, not sure if that is a good thing or not    
    jne .get_str_len

    rep movsw}

It works... again! I'm almost impressed by myself.

I have no idea if my wrangling just made the code worse or not (lol), but it was fun to see that I could get it to work.
Hmm... so what was the point of the post? Err... well, maybe you guys can tell me if my reworking of the original code is totally messed up or not. Laughing

Edit: (Hmm, now that i think about it, this isn't really windows related... i think. Oops. I made the macro inside a windows program, so I just kinda posted it here.)

07 Nov 2010, 04:46

revolution
When all else fails, read the source

Joined: 24 Aug 2004
Posts: 18034
Location: In your JS exploiting you and your system

revolution

Your use of ax instead of al is fine.

But your use of ecx as a counter for rep movsw should be counting elements, not bytes.

In your third code section you are not reading the string when trying to find the length, you only increment di (should be edi) until it reaches zero.

07 Nov 2010, 13:11

Fred

Joined: 22 Oct 2010
Posts: 39

Fred

Quote:

But your use of ecx as a counter for rep movsw should be counting elements, not bytes.

Could you explain it a little more in-depth? Very Happy

That's how the initial code was, except using edx.

Quote:

In your third code section you are not reading the string when trying to find the length, you only increment di (should be edi) until it reaches zero.

Yes, you're right - it actually doesn't work. Bah... I'm sure I tested it yesterday... that's one downside with doing it at 04:30, I guess. Thanks for pointing out the errors, I'll try to fix it. Razz

07 Nov 2010, 15:10

revolution
When all else fails, read the source

Joined: 24 Aug 2004
Posts: 18034
Location: In your JS exploiting you and your system

revolution

Code:

mov ecx,1
rep movsd ;move 4 bytes, one dword element

mov ecx,1
rep movsw ;move 2 bytes, one word element

mov ecx,1
rep movsb ;move 1 byte, one byte element

07 Nov 2010, 15:29

Fred

Joined: 22 Oct 2010
Posts: 39

Fred

Yes, that makes sense.

Code:

macro strcatW dest,src{
local .get_str_len

    mov edi,dest
    mov esi,src
    mov ecx,-1

.get_str_len:
    mov eax,[edi]
    inc edi
    inc ecx
    test ax,ax
    jne .get_str_len

    rep movsw}

This seems to work, but I can see that I don't understand it fully yet. Moving the data to eax works... for now, at least.
But something else is that I can put some random values into ecx and it will still work. Why's that?

07 Nov 2010, 16:59

revolution
When all else fails, read the source

Joined: 24 Aug 2004
Posts: 18034
Location: In your JS exploiting you and your system

revolution

Try this:

Code:

macro strcatW dest,src{
local .get_str_len

    mov edi,dest
    mov esi,src
    mov ecx,-1 + 1 ;we need one more byte to copy the zero terminator also

.get_str_len:
    mov ax,[esi] ;word values only
    add esi,2 ;we read two bytes
    inc ecx ;add one element
    test ax,ax
    jne .get_str_len
    mov esi,src ;recover start address

.find_dest_pointer:
    mov ax,[edi] ;word values only
    add edi,2 ;we read two bytes
    test ax,ax
    jne .find_dest_pointer
    sub edi,2

    rep movsw}

07 Nov 2010, 20:59

Fred

Joined: 22 Oct 2010
Posts: 39

Fred

Yeah, I looked through my code a little more in-depth today and saw what I tried to do and what I really did. I guess that means that I learned something. (POWER UP) Razz

Thanks for the code snippets and explanations.

07 Nov 2010, 22:32

rugxulo

Joined: 09 Aug 2005
Posts: 2341
Location: Usono (aka, USA)

rugxulo

revolution wrote:

Code:

mov ecx,1
rep movsd ;move 4 bytes, one dword element

mov ecx,1
rep movsw ;move 2 bytes, one word element

mov ecx,1
rep movsb ;move 1 byte, one byte element

Wait, what??? Just do this:

Code:

movsd ; move 4 bytes
movsw ; move 2 bytes
movsb ; move 1 byte

08 Nov 2010, 16:59

shoorick

Joined: 25 Feb 2005
Posts: 1608
Location: Ukraine

shoorick

another example:

Code:

macro _strcat dest,sour {
    mov edi,dest
    mov esi,sour
    mov ecx,-1
    xor eax,eax
    repne scasw ; searching zero word in first string
    sub edi,2 ; restore pointer to the zero at the and of the first string
.m:
    cmp word [esi],0 ; copy word by word same time comparing words with zero
    movsw
    jne .m ; to know when to stop
}

09 Nov 2010, 06:41

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