Can use execute a binary from memory opposed to from a disk?

Actually, I am not sure "packers" do this at all.

For example, winzip that creates a self-extracting exe...

It sticks whatever it is packing after the "packer part" of the program, but whatever is unpacked is written to disk.

An analogy would be to have zipped exe, that unzips itself and runs without writing any files to disk.

I do not know of any packer / archiver that does this. All of them simply unpack their payload to disk before executing anything else.

You really should read what www.strongbit.com can do as far as hiding the code in the PE and scemes to make it almost impossible to follow in memory..this does not pack the PE then unpack it to the disk as you previous stated...is is NOT like PKZIP or WINZIP....it works with a native EXE and .NET programs.

That does seem like a pretty neat tool. It would be nice to see how it really works. It seems that would significantly increase executable sizes though and It is unclear if it encrypts non-executable data.

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Originally Posted by DeepT

That does seem like a pretty neat tool. It would be nice to see how it really works. It seems that would significantly increase executable sizes though and It is unclear if it encrypts non-executable data.

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Yes is does encrypt and compress non-exe data. My exe size went from 560K to ~285K built in VS 2005 native exe with same results from VC++ 6.0.

There is a 30 day eval on their exe encryptor....give it a try...what do you have to loose...then get a PE viewer and try to read your data in the NEW exe...

P.S. I'm not connected with Strongbit in any way..other than liking their product..so far