I recently written about my explorations into the Bitcoin peer-to-peer network from the context of an Elixir application. These explorations have caused me to get up-close and personal with binary data as I serialize and parse packets at the byte level.

Being a visual person, I wanted some way of inspecting the binaries I was constructing and sending. I decided that a hex dump would be the best way to visualize these packets.

What followed was an odyssey of finding and implementing a safe and fast process for printing hex dumps of arbitrary, untrusted binary data from within an Elixir application.

Calling Out to the System

My first instinct for implementing a hex dump method within my application was to not implement it at all! It made more sense to leverage the existing hexdump command line utility living on my system.

Specially, I wanted to render my packets with the hexdump -C command. The -C flag includes an ASCII rendering of the bytes being dumped:

0000 F9 BE B4 D9 76 65 72 73 69 6F 6E 00 00 00 00 00 ....version..... 0010 55 00 00 00 9C 7C 00 00 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 U....|.......... 0020 E6 15 10 4D 00 00 00 00 01 00 00 00 00 ...M.........

Unfortunately, calling hexdump from within an Elixir application proved to be more challenging than I first expected.

When trying to call system commands, I reflexively reach for Elixir’s System.cmd/3 function. Unfortunately, hexdump relies on the input bytes through either stdin , or through a file. Because System.cmd/3 only lets you pass arguments to your system command, not data through stdin , we can’t use it to build our hex dumps.

Another option would be to write our packets to a temporary file, and use System.cmd/3 to instruct hexdump to load and dump the bytes in that file. Relying on temporary files seems like a poor choice for a logging utility that would be called hundreds to thousands of times per minute.

While System.cmd/3 won’t work, maybe we can use an Elixir Port directly. Unfortunately, while we can pipe our binary data directly to hexdump using a port, there is no way to signal the end of our data by sending the expected EOF ( ^D ) signal. Without signaling the end of our byte stream, closing the port will leave us without any data to show for our work.

Here Be Dragons

Our third option for solving this problem is to dig deeper into our tool belt and pull out the big guns. Both System.cmd/3 and Port have limitations in this context, but Erlang’s :os.cmd/1 gives us exactly what we need:

output = ('echo "' ++ :binary.bin_to_list(data) ++ '" | hexdump -C') |> :os.cmd()

We can use :os.cmd/1 to evaulate any shell command, including compositions of commands strung together with pipes and redirections.

In this case, our command uses echo to pipe our binary into hexdump -C . The :os.cmd/1 function expects our shell command to be in the form of a character list, so we use Erlang’s :binary.bin_to_list/1 to inject our binary data directly into our echo argument.

However, this solution has major security issues.

Depending on the source of our data binary, we’re potentially giving outside sources free reign to run any shell command on our machine. Considering that this hex dump is intended to log packets received from external sources on the Bitcoin peer-to-peer network, this is a catastrophically bad idea.

We need to find another solution.

Going the Safe Route

Ultimately, I decided that the safest and fastest solution to my problem was to simply build my own hex dump utility in pure Elixir.

The general idea behind the hexdump tool is simple. For every line, display the current byte count in hex, followed by two chunks of eight bytes rendered in hex, followed by all sixteen bytes rendered together as ASCII characters.

This is a great chance to flex our Elixir muscles. Let’s implement this in a to_string/1 function within a new Hexdump module:

defmodule Hexdump do def to_string(data) when is_binary(data) do # TODO: Implement `to_string`... end def to_string(data), do: Kernel.inspect(data) end

We only want to run our hex dump algorithm on binary data, so we’ll guard our first function head with an is_binary guard. If data isn’t binary, we’ll simply return the result of Kernel.inspect/2 .

In order to work more easily with our data binary, let’s convert it into a list of bytes and chunk it into our lines of sixteen bytes:

data |> :binary.bin_to_list() |> Enum.chunk_every(16)

We want to divide each of our lines of sixteen bytes into two groups of eight (or fewer) bytes. If we don’t have enough bytes to create our second group, we’ll append an empty list to fill its place:

|> Enum.map(&Enum.chunk_every(&1, 8)) |> Enum.map(fn [a] -> [a, []] [a, b] -> [a, b] end)

Now we’re left with a list of lines. Within each line is a list of two eight byte groupings.

We’ll use the index of the outer list to calculate and render how many bytes we’ve dumped so far. We’ll need to attach that to our list with Enum.with_index/2 :

|> Enum.with_index()

Finally, we’ll map our lines over a function that transforms each line tuple into a string, and we’ll join the resulting list of strings with newlines:

|> Enum.map(&line_to_string/1) |> Enum.join("

")

Our line_to_string/1 function is a helper that accepts a tuple of eight byte parts and the current line index , and returns the string representation of the current line:

def line_to_string({parts, index}) do end

The first job of line_to_string/1 is to build the current byte count in hex. The byte count needs to be padded to at least eight characters:

count = index |> Kernel.*(16) |> :binary.encode_unsigned() |> Base.encode16(case: :lower) |> String.pad_leading(8, "0")

Next, we map over each eight byte part of our line. We render each byte in each part into hex by converting it into a binary using Erlang’s :binary.encode_unsigned/1 and rendering it into base sixteen with Elixir’s Base.encode16/2 . Next, can join the characters in each of our parts with spaces and pad the result to twenty three characters using String.pad_trailing/3 :

bytes = parts |> Enum.map(fn bytes -> bytes |> Enum.map(fn byte -> byte |> :binary.encode_unsigned() |> Base.encode16(case: :lower) end) |> Enum.join(" ") |> String.pad_trailing(23, " ") end)

The ASCII component of each line is rendered in a similar way. Because we don’t want a divider in the middle of our ASCII rendering, we’ll flatten our eight byte parts and map each byte over a function that converts it into a printable string. If the byte falls between 0x20 and 0x7E , we convert it into a string. Otherwise, we return "." .

ascii = parts |> List.flatten() |> Enum.map(fn byte -> case byte <= 0x7E && byte >= 0x20 do true -> <<byte>> false -> "." end end) |> Enum.join("")

Now we can flatten our byte count, each of our two byte parts, and our ASCII representation into a single list and join them together with two characters of whitespace separating each component:

[count, bytes, ascii] |> List.flatten() |> Enum.join(" ")

And that’s it!

We can safely use our new Hexdump module to safely and quickly create a hex dump string of any binary packets encountered by our application:

<< 0xF9, 0xBE, 0xB4, 0xD9, 0x76, 0x65, 0x72, 0x73, 0x69, 0x6F, 0x6E, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x55, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x9C, 0x7C, 0x00, 0x00 >> |> Hexdump.to_string() |> IO.puts()

0000 F9 BE B4 D9 76 65 72 73 69 6F 6E 00 00 00 00 00 ....version..... 0010 55 00 00 00 9C 7C 00 00 U....|..

Final Thoughts

What an adventure. The moral of this story is that using the tools and resources available to you is fantastic in the right situations.

That said, it’s important to always be aware of the downsides and potential costs of using existing solutions. Sometimes, rolling your own solution is the right choice. In my case, using the command line version of hexdump would have been horrendously insecure and most likely less performant than implementing my own solution.