There is a standard way to embed any file into an ELF. The program "objcopy" creates object files from arbitrary input files. You then simply link the objects into your executable. The program can then access those arbitrary embedded data chunks by their symbol names, just as if they were literal strings in the source code.

I explain how to do this in the context of embedding a version file here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16349557/does-gcc-have-a...