Writing a very basic debugger

Question

Is it possible to write a program under windows that will cause a remote process thread to break (stop execution in that thread) upon reaching a predefined address?

I have been experimenting with the Windows Debug API, but it seems very limited when it comes to setting breakpoints. The DebugBreakProcess function seemed promising, but I can't find any examples on how to use this API call.

Answer 1

You need to use WriteProcessMemory to write a breakpoint (on x86, an opcode of 0xCC) to the address. On x86, when the debuggee hits that point in the code the 0xCC will generate an int 3 exception. This is picked up by your debugger's WaitForDebugEvent will return a DEBUG_EVENT with EXCEPTION_DEBUG_EVENT set.

You then need to patch the that address back to its original code before continuing. If you want to break again, you need to single step and then repatch the breakpoint opcode. To single step, you need to set the single step flag in EFlag in the thread context.

DebugBreakProcess is used to generate a remote break of a process you are debugging - it can't be used to break at an arbitrary point in the code.