Inside the Windows Loader: Replicating Portable Executable Mapping with IronPE in Rust

IronPE is a minimal Windows PE manual loader written in Rust for both x86 and x64 PE files. The goal of IronPE is to explore how Windows loads Portable Executables internally and to demonstrate how this process can be implemented in Rust.

It is designed to help understand:

• Windows PE internals
• Manual loading techniques
• Reverse engineering concepts

Features

• Manual PE loading
• Section mapping
• Base relocations
• Import resolution
• Execute PE from memory
• x86 and x64 PE support

How it works?

IronPE performs the following steps to execute a PE file from memory:

1. Read PE file into memory
2. Parse PE headers
3. Allocate memory using VirtualAlloc
4. Copy PE headers and sections
5. Apply base relocations
6. Resolve imports using LoadLibrary and GetProcAddress
7. Transfer execution to the Original Entry Point (OEP)

This process mimics the behavior of the Windows PE loader.

An x64 PE cannot be loaded by an x86 loader, and vice versa.

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