Naveen's Blog

In this post I would show a simple trick to update .NET strings in memory with Windbg. The caveat is make sure the string that you’re updating is long enough to fit into the string buffer. If not there would be a memory corruption.

Here is a simple windows form application with title “Good”

The goal is to update the title from “Good” to “Bad”.

button1.Click += (s,b) => Text = _caption;

I am updating the title in the button click.

Here is the actual string object within the debugger

0:006> !do 0294d0a0
Name:        System.String
MethodTable: 59b9fb64
EEClass:     598d8bb0
Size:        22(0x16) bytes
File:        C:\Windows\Microsoft.Net\assembly\GAC_32\mscorlib\
v4.0_4.0.0.0__b77a5c561934e089\mscorlib.dll
String:      Good
Fields:
      MT    Field   Offset                 Type VT     Attr    Value Name
59ba2b30  40000ed        4         System.Int32  1 instance        4 m_stringLength
59ba1f80  40000ee        8          System.Char  1 instance       47 m_firstChar
59b9fb64  40000ef        8        System.String  0   shared   static Empty
    >> Domain:Value  004b0308:02941228 <<

I would be using the e  command to update the memory. The ezu command is used for updating  Null-terminated Unicode string .

Notice the first character starts in the 8th offset from the above. So we would have start updating the string only from the 8th offset. The first 8 bytes of object are for syncblock index and method table pointer.

Here is the command to update the string memory.

ezu 0294d0a0+8 “Bad”

And the updated form title.