can a program read its own elf section?

How can I print the build version of the program (located in the .note.gnu.build-id elf section) from the program itself?

1. You need to read the ElfW(Ehdr) (at the beginning of the file) to find program headers in your binary (.e_phoff and .e_phnum will tell you where program headers are, and how many of them to read).

2. You then read program headers, until you find PT_NOTE segment of your program. That segment will tell you offset to the beginning of all the notes in your binary.

3. You then need to read the ElfW(Nhdr) and skip the rest of the note (total size of the note is sizeof(Nhdr) + .n_namesz + .n_descsz, properly aligned), until you find a note with .n_type == NT_GNU_BUILD_ID.

4. Once you find NT_GNU_BUILD_ID note, skip past its .n_namesz, and read the .n_descsz bytes to read the actual build-id.

You can verify that you are reading the right data by comparing what you read with the output of readelf -n a.out.

P.S.

If you are going to go through the trouble to decode build-id as above, and if your executable is not stripped, it may be better for you to just decode and print symbol names instead (i.e. to replicate what backtrace_symbols does) -- it's actually easier to do than decoding ELF notes, because the symbol table contains fixed-sized entries.

Basically, this is the code I've written based on answer given to my question. In order to compile the code I had to make some changes and I hope it will work for as many types of platforms as possible. However, it was tested only on one build machine. One of the assumptions I used was that the program was built on the machine which runs it so no point in checking endianness compatibility between the program and the machine.

user@:~/$ uname -s -r -m -o
Linux 3.2.0-45-generic x86_64 GNU/Linux
user@:~/$ g++ test.cpp -o test
user@:~/$ readelf -n test | grep Build
    Build ID: dc5c4682e0282e2bd8bc2d3b61cfe35826aa34fc
user@:~/$ ./test
    Build ID: dc5c4682e0282e2bd8bc2d3b61cfe35826aa34fc

#include <elf.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <sys/mman.h>
#include <sys/stat.h>

#if __x86_64__
#  define ElfW(type) Elf64_##type
#else
#  define ElfW(type) Elf32_##type
#endif

/*
detecting build id of a program from its note section
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17637745/can-a-program-read-its-own-elf-section
http://www.scs.stanford.edu/histar/src/pkg/uclibc/utils/readelf.c
http://www.sco.com/developers/gabi/2000-07-17/ch5.pheader.html#note_section
*/

int main (int argc, char* argv[])
{
  char *thefilename = argv[0];
  FILE *thefile;
  struct stat statbuf;
  ElfW(Ehdr) *ehdr = 0;
  ElfW(Phdr) *phdr = 0;
  ElfW(Nhdr) *nhdr = 0;
  if (!(thefile = fopen(thefilename, "r"))) {
    perror(thefilename);
    exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
  }
  if (fstat(fileno(thefile), &statbuf) < 0) {
    perror(thefilename);
    exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
  }
  ehdr = (ElfW(Ehdr) *)mmap(0, statbuf.st_size, 
    PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE, fileno(thefile), 0);
  phdr = (ElfW(Phdr) *)(ehdr->e_phoff + (size_t)ehdr);
  while (phdr->p_type != PT_NOTE)
  {
    ++phdr;
  }
  nhdr = (ElfW(Nhdr) *)(phdr->p_offset + (size_t)ehdr); 
  while (nhdr->n_type != NT_GNU_BUILD_ID)
  {
    nhdr = (ElfW(Nhdr) *)((size_t)nhdr + sizeof(ElfW(Nhdr)) + nhdr->n_namesz + nhdr->n_descsz);
  }
  unsigned char * build_id = (unsigned char *)malloc(nhdr->n_descsz);
  memcpy(build_id, (void *)((size_t)nhdr + sizeof(ElfW(Nhdr)) + nhdr->n_namesz), nhdr->n_descsz);
  printf("    Build ID: ");
  for (int i = 0 ; i < nhdr->n_descsz ; ++i)
  {
    printf("%02x",build_id[i]);
  }
  free(build_id);
  printf("\n");
  return 0;
}