Archive for the ‘Portable Executable’ Category

Calling System Service APIs in Kernel

Wednesday, January 26th, 2011

In this post I am not going to shed any new light about this topic, but I didn’t find anything like this organized in one place, so I decided to write it down, hope you will find it useful.

Sometimes when you develop a kernel driver you need to use some internal API that cannot be accessed normally through the DDK. Though you may say “but it’s not an API if it’s not officially exported and supported by MS”. Well that’s kinda true, the point is that some functions like that which are not accessible from the kernel, are really accessible from usermode, hence they are called API. After all, if you can call NtCreateFile from usermode, eventually you’re supposed to be able to do that from kernel, cause it really happens in kernel, right? Obviously, NtCreateFile is an official API in the kernel too.

When I mean using system service APIs, I really mean by doing it platform/version independent, so it will work on all versions of Windows. Except when MS changes the interface (number of parameters for instance, or their type) to the services themselves, but that rarely happens.

I am not going to explain how the architecture of the SSDT and the transitions from user to kernel or how syscalls, etc work. Just how to use it to our advantage. It is clear that MS doesn’t want you to use some of its APIs in the kernel. But sometimes it’s unavoidable, and using undocumented API is fine with me, even in production(!) if you know how to do it well and as robust as possible, but that’s another story. We know that MS doesn’t want you to use some of these APIs because a) they just don’t export it in kernel on purpose, that is. b) starting with 64 bits versions of Windows they made it harder on purpose to use or manipulate the kernel, by removing previously exported symbols from kernel, we will get to that later on.

Specifically I needed ZwProtectVirtualMemory, because I wanted to change the protection of some page in the user address space. And that function isn’t exported by the DDK, bummer. Now remember that it is accessible to usermode (as VirtualProtectMemory through kernel32.dll syscall…), therefore there ought to be a way to get it (the address of the function in kernel) in a reliable manner inside a kernel mode driver in order to use it too. And this is what I’m going to talk about in this post. I’m going to assume that you already run code in the kernel and that you are a legitimate driver because it’s really going to help us with some exported symbols, not talking about shellcodes here, although shellcodes can use this technique by changing it a bit.

We have a few major tasks in order to achieve our goal: Map the usermode equivalent .dll file. We need to get the index number of the service we want to call. Then we need to get the base address of ntos and the address of the (service) table of pointers (the SSDT itself) to the functions in the kernel. And voila…

The first one is easy both in 32 and 64 bits systems. There are mainly 3 files which make the syscalls in usermode, such as: ntdll, kernel32 and user32 (for GDI calls). For each API you want to call in kernel, you have to know its prototype and in which file you will find it (MSDN supplies some of this or just Google it). The idea is to map the file to the address space as an (executable) image. Note that the cool thing about this mapping is that you will get the address of the required file in usermode. Remember that these files are physically shared among all processes after boot time (For instance, addresses might change because of ASLR but stay consistent as long as the machine is up). Following that we will use a similar functionality to GetProcAddress, but one that you have to write yourself in kernel, which is really easy for PE and PE+ (64 bits).

Alright, so we got the image mapped, we can now get some usermode API function’s address using our GetProcAddress, now what? Well, now we have to get the index number of the syscall we want. Before I continue, this is the right place to say that I’ve seen so many approaches to this problem, disassemblers, binary patterns matching, etc. And I decided to come up with something really simple and maybe new. You take two functions that you know for sure that are going to be inside kernel32.dll (for instance), say, CreateFile and CloseHandle. And then simply compare byte after byte from both functions to find the first different byte, that byte contains the index number of the syscall (or the low byte out of the 4 bytes integer really). Probably you have no idea what I’m talking about, let me show you some usermode API’s that directly do syscalls:

XP SP3 ntdll.dll
B8 25 00 00 00                    mov     eax, 25h        ; NtCreateFile
BA 00 03 FE 7F                    mov     edx, 7FFE0300h
FF 12                             call    dword ptr [edx]
C2 2C 00                          retn    2Ch

B8 19 00 00 00                    mov     eax, 19h        ; NtClose
BA 00 03 FE 7F                    mov     edx, 7FFE0300h
FF 12                             call    dword ptr [edx]
C2 04 00                          retn    4

Vista SP1 32 bits ntdll.dll

B8 3C 00 00 00                    mov     eax, 3Ch        ; NtCreateFile
BA 00 03 FE 7F                    mov     edx, 7FFE0300h
FF 12                             call    dword ptr [edx]
C2 2C 00                          retn    2Ch

B8 30 00 00 00                    mov     eax, 30h        ; NtClose
BA 00 03 FE 7F                    mov     edx, 7FFE0300h
FF 12                             call    dword ptr [edx]
C2 04 00                          retn    4

Vista SP2 64 bits ntdll.dll

4C 8B D1                          mov     r10, rcx        ; NtCreateFile
B8 52 00 00 00                    mov     eax, 52h
0F 05                             syscall
C3                                retn

4C 8B D1                          mov     r10, rcx        ; NtClose
B8 0C 00 00 00                    mov     eax, 0Ch
0F 05                             syscall
C3                                retn

2008 sp2 64 bits ntdll.dll

4C 8B D1                          mov     r10, rcx        ; NtCreateFile
B8 52 00 00 00                    mov     eax, 52h
0F 05                             syscall
C3                                retn

4C 8B D1                          mov     r10, rcx        ; NtClose
B8 0C 00 00 00                    mov     eax, 0Ch
0F 05                             syscall
C3                                retn

Win7 64bits syswow64 ntdll.dll

B8 52 00 00 00                    mov     eax, 52h        ; NtCreateFile
33 C9                             xor     ecx, ecx
8D 54 24 04                       lea     edx, [esp+arg_0]
64 FF 15 C0 00 00+                call    large dword ptr fs:0C0h
83 C4 04                          add     esp, 4
C2 2C 00                          retn    2Ch

B8 0C 00 00 00                    mov     eax, 0Ch        ; NtClose
33 C9                             xor     ecx, ecx
8D 54 24 04                       lea     edx, [esp+arg_0]
64 FF 15 C0 00 00+                call    large dword ptr fs:0C0h
83 C4 04                          add     esp, 4
C2 04 00                          retn    4

These are a few snippets to show you how the syscall function templates look like. They are generated automatically by some tool MS wrote and they don’t change a lot as you can see from the various architectures I gathered here. Anyway, if you take a look at the bytes block of each function, you will see that you can easily spot the correct place where you can read the index of the syscall we are going to use. That’s why doing a diff on two functions from the same .dll would work well and reliably. Needless to say that we are going to use the index number we get with the table inside the kernel in order to get the corresponding function in the kernel.

This technique gives us the index number of the syscall of any exported function in any one of the .dlls mentioned above. This is valid both for 32 and 64 bits. And by the way, notice that the operand type (=immediate) that represents the index number is always a 4 bytes integer (dword) in the ‘mov’ instruction, just makes life easier.

To the next task, in order to find the base address of the service table or what is known as the system service descriptor table (in short SSDT), we will have to get the base address of the ntoskrnl.exe image first. There might be different kernel image loaded in the system (with or without PAE, uni-processor or multi-processor), but it doesn’t matter in the following technique I’m going to use, because it’s based on memory and not files… This task is really easy when you are a driver, means that if you want some exported symbol from the kernel that the DDK supplies – the PE loader will get it for you. So it means we get, without any work, the address of any function like NtClose or NtCreateFile, etc. Both are inside ntos, obviously. Starting with that address we will round down the address to the nearest page and scan downwards to find an ‘MZ’ signature, which will mark the base address of the whole image in memory. If you’re afraid from false positives using this technique you’re welcome to go further and check for a ‘PE’ signature, or use other techniques.

This should do the trick:

PVOID FindNtoskrnlBase(PVOID Addr)
{
    /// Scandown from a given symbol's address.
    Addr = (PVOID)((ULONG_PTR)Addr & ~0xfff);
    __try {
        while ((*(PUSHORT)Addr != IMAGE_DOS_SIGNATURE)) {
            Addr = (PVOID) ((ULONG_PTR)Addr - PAGE_SIZE);
        }
        return Addr;
    }
    __except(1) { }
    return NULL;
}

And you can call it with a parameter like FindNtoskrnlBase(ZwClose). This is what I meant that you know the address of ZwClose or any other symbol in the image which will give you some “anchor”.

After we got the base address of ntos, we need to retrieve the address of the service table in kernel. That can be done using the same GetProcAddress we used earlier on the mapped user mode .dll files. But this time we will be looking for the “KeServiceDescriptorTable” exported symbol.

So far you can see that we got anchors (what I call for a reliable way to get an address of anything in memory) and we are good to go, this will work in production without the need to worry. If you wanna start the flame war about the unlegitimate use of undocumented APIs, etc. I’m clearly not interested. :)
Anyway, in Windows 32 bits, the latter symbol is exported, but it is not exported in 64 bits! This is part of the PatchGuard system, to make life harder for rootkits, 3rd party drivers doing exactly what I’m talking about, etc. I’m not going to cover how to get that address in 64 bits in this post.

The KeServiceDescriptorTable is a table that holds a few pointers to other service tables which contain the real addresses of the service functions the OS supplies to usermode. So a simple dereference to the table and you get the pointer to the first table which is the one you are looking for. Using that pointer, which is really the base address of the pointers table, you use the index we read earlier from the required function and you got, at last, the pointer to that function in kernel, which you can now use.

The bottom line is that now you can use any API that is given to usermode also in kernelmode and you’re not limited to a specific Windows version, nor updates, etc. and you can do it in a reliable manner which is the most important thing. Also we didn’t require any special algorithms nor disassemblers (as much as I like diStorm…). Doing so in shellcodes make life a bit harder, because we had the assumption that we got some reliable way to find the ntos base address. But every kid around the block knows it’s easy to do it anyway.

Happy coding :)

References I found interesting about this topic:
http://j00ru.vexillium.org/?p=222
http://alter.org.ua/docs/nt_kernel/procaddr/

http://uninformed.org/index.cgi?v=3&a=4&p=5

And how to do it in 64 bits:

http://www.gamedeception.net/threads/20349-X64-Syscall-Index

New Project – ReviveR

Saturday, September 25th, 2010

Hey all,

long time haven’t posted. I’m kinda busy with lots of stuff.
Anyway I just wanted to let you know that I’m starting to work on the sequel of diStorm, you guessed it right… A reversing studio!
Unlike what many people said, the core is going to be written in C++, the GUI is going to be written per OS. No thanks, QT. Top goals are performance, scripting, good UI and most important good analysis capabilities. Obviously it’s going to be open source, cross platform. For a start, it will support only x86 and AMD64 and PE file format, maybe ELF too, though not my priority. I’m not sure about a debugger yet, but it will probably be implemented later. GUI is going to be written using WPF under C#, just to give you an idea.

My main interests are performance and binary code analysis algorithms.

If there are highly skilled programmers who wish to help, please contact me.
For now it seems we are a group of 4 coders, I’m still not going to publish their names, until everything is settled.

Anyway, design is taking place nowadays. This is your time for suggesting new features and ideas.

Big good luck

VML + ANI ZERT Patches

Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009

It is time to release an old presentation about the VML and ANI vulnerabilities that were patched by ZERT. It explains the vulnerabilities and how they were closed. It is somewhat very technical, Assembly is required if you wanna really enjoy it. I also gave a talk using this presentation in CCC 2007. It so happened that I wrote the patches, with the extensive help of the team, of course.

ZERT Patches.ppt

Import Symbols by Ordinals in Link-Time (using VS)

Thursday, August 7th, 2008

I bet some of you have always wanted to use a system dll file which has a few exported functions, though by ordinal numbers only. Yesterday it happenned to me. I had a dll which exported many a function by ordinal. For instance, you can take a look yourself at ws2_32.dll to learn quickly using dependency walker or another tool the exports of this file. Sometimes you have a 3rd party dll file which you lack both the header file (.h) and a .lib file. And let’s say that you know which functions (their ordinals) you want to use and their prototypes (which is a must). There are several approaches to use the dll in that case.

1) Use LoadLibrary and GetProcAddress programmatically to control the load and pointers retrieval for the functions you’re interested in. This is like the number one guaranteed way to work. I don’t like this idea, because sometimes you are bound to use the library as it is already linked to the file at link-time. Another disadvantage I find important is that you have to change your code in order to support that 3rd party dll functinoality. And for me this is out of question. The code should stay as it is nevertheless the way I use outsider dlls. And besides, why to bother add extra code for imported functions when the linker should do it for you?

2) Use delay-load dll’s, but you will still have to use some helper functions in order to import a function by its ordinal. If you ask me, this is just lame, and probably you don’t need a lazy load anyway.

3) Patching your PE file manually to use ordinals instead of function names. But there’s a catch here, how can you compile your file, if you can’t resolve the symbols? Well, that depends on the support your 3rd party dll has. For example, you might have a .lib file for one version of the 3rd party dll and then everything is splendid. But with a newer version of that dll, all symbols are exported by ordinals. So you can still compile your code using the older .lib, but then you will have to patch the PE. Well, this is the way I did it the first time yesterday, only to witness that everything works well. But even if you change your code slightly and recompile it you will have to fix the PE again and again. This is out of question. And besides you don’t solve a solution with atomic bomb when you can use a small missle, even if you have the skills to do that, something it’s possibly wrong and you should look for a different way, I believe this is true for most things in life anyway.

4) Using IMPORTS statement in your .def file. Which there you tell the linker how to resolve the symbols and everything. Well, this sounds like the ultimate solution, but unforetunately, you will get a linker warning: “warning LNK4017: IMPORTS statement not supported for the target platform; ignored”. Now you ask yourself what target platform are you on? Of course, x86, although I bet the feature is just not supported, so don’t go that way. The thing is that even Watcom C supports this statement, which is like the best thing ever. It seems that Visual C has supported it for sometime, but no more. And you know what’s worse? Delphi: procedure ImportByOrdinal; external MyLib index Ordinal; When I saw that line I freaked out that VS doesn’t have support for such a thing as well, so cruel you say. ;)

5) And finally the real way to do it. Eventually I couldn’t manage to avoid the compiler tools of VS anymore and I decided to give them a try. Which I gotta say was a pleasant move, because the tools are all easy to use and in 10 mins I finished hacking the best solution out there, apparently…

It all comes down to the way you export and import functions. We all know how to export functions, we can use both dllspec(dllexport) or use a .def file which within we state which symbols to export, as simple as that. Of course, you could have used dllspec(dllimport) but that is only when you got a symbolic name for your import.

So what you have to do is this, write a new .def file which will export (yes, export) all the functions you want to import! but this time it’s a bit more tricky since you gotta handle specially the symbolic names of the imports, I will get to that soon. An example of a .def file that will import from ‘ws2_32.dll’ is this:

LIBRARY ws2_32.dll

EXPORTS

    MyAnonymousWSFunction @ 555

That’s it. We have a function name to use in our code to access some anonymous function which is exported by the ordinal 555. Well but that ain’t enough, you still need to do one more thing with this newly created .def file and that is to create a .lib file out of it using a tool named  ‘lib’: lib /DEF:my.def /OUT:my.lib

Now you got a new .lib file which describes the imports you want to use in your original PE file. You go back to that code and add this new ‘my.lib’ file in the linker options and you’re done.

Just as a tip, you can use ‘dumpbin /exports ida.lib’ in order to verify your required symbols.

We can now understand that in order to import symbols, VS requires a .lib file (and in order to export you need a .def file). The nice thing about it is that we can create one on our own. However, as much as we wish to use a .def file to import symbols too, it’s impossible.

One or two more things you should know. The linker might shout at you that a symbol __imp__blabla is not found. That does NOT mean you have to define your symbol with a prefix of __imp__. Let’s stick to demangled names, since I haven’t tried it on C++ names and it’s easier sticking to a simple case.

For cdecl calling convention you add a prefix of ‘_’ to your symbol name. For stdcall calling convention you don’t add any prefix nor suffix. But again, for stdcall you will have to instruct the linker how many bytes on stack the function requires (according to the prototype), so it’s as simple as the number of params multiplied by 4. Thus if you got a prototype of ‘void bla(int a, int* b);’ You will define your symbol as ‘bla@8 @ 555′. Note that the first number after the @ is the number of bytes, and the second one is the ordinal number, which is the most important thing around here.

And one last thing you should know, if you want to import data (no cdecl nor stdcall that is) you have to end the symbol’s line with ‘DATA’. Just like this: ‘MyFunc @ 666 DATA’.

I am positive this one gonna save some of you guys, good luck.

Last Version Hopefully

Saturday, February 9th, 2008

of Tiny PE that is. 216 bytes – over here.

 Some juicy details of the new tricks:

1. I had a gap of 4 bytes between two code chunks. 4 bytes is an immediate of 32 bits. Instead of jumping over this 4 bytes (which is a pointer to import data directory), I just skip over them using something stupid like MOV EDX, <DWORD>. Where <DWORD> is a place holder for the pointer. This way I destroy the value in EDX, but I chose EDX because I don’t use it anyway. I end up sparing a byte this way because jmp is 2 bytes long, and opcode for the mov is 1 byte.

2. Another problem was that the opcode of the mov was the same data as part of the export data directory size which poses a limitation on the values I could put there. Make long story short – I changed the base address of my image and adding size field of the directory size (the byte code for the mov is the high byte in the size DWORD field)  with the new base address there is no overflow and the exports continue to work well…

3. Immediately following the ‘Number Of Sections’ field I had the decryption loop code. In the beginning I used XOR for simplicity but now it’s changed to ADD R/M8, REG8. This is because this field is two bytes (a WORD) with the value of 1, means the image contains only one section and the second high byte is 0. The ADD byte code is 0. Do you make the math? So now I reuse this 0 byte to be a code for my decryption loop. Cool as it is, I had to change the code which encrypts the data in the image. XORing is really easy to do, but now my instruction looks something like this: add byte [ebx+ecx+off], bl. Mind you I know the value in BL in static time. Therefore I had to change the algorithm. Let plain-text-byte be P and value-of-BL be B, we got the following: Cipher = (P+256-B) & 255 for each byte we want to encrypt. The trick here is the modulo base, since we work with byte units (and it seems they are eventually truncated to 8 bits), we have to consider the add with the modulo. Decryption is actually: P = (Cipher + B) % 256. Anyway this way I saved one byte and it was a good practice on modulo stuff… ;)

4. Another byte was shaved by changing the URL of the image I download and execute by changing the URL from:

http ://ragestorm.net/f.DLL
to
http ://ragestorm.net/kernel32.DLL

Naughty? I need the kernel32.DLL anyway. So this way I can remove the ‘f’ and put the “kernel32” instead. So yes, now you’re downloading a file called ‘kernel32.DLL’ from my site. Though it’s being saved as something else locally… Ahh BTW-this way the image should be Win2000 compliant, but I can’t check it out. Any volunteers?

I wanted to release the code a month ago, but since then I have changed the code so many times. I think this is my final version for now :grins:. So I will pretty the code a bit and document some stuff and release it.

TinyPE NG is Out

Thursday, January 17th, 2008

Here you go guys:
http://ragestorm.net/tiny/tinypeng.exe

Source will be released withing a couple of weeks.
Have fun :)
Meanwhile I will be in Turkey for the weekend to relax and leave the bits behind.

Kix$

TinyPE NG

Tuesday, January 15th, 2008

I rewrote TinyPE and just got to 240 bytes!!!!!1!!11!!11!!1! * 9**9**9

Downloading a file from the .net (specifically my own site) and running it, while the strings in the .exe must be encrypted in someway. You can find more information by googling the TinyPE Challenge.

Holy shit, I’m kinda excited myself, it was my goal and I have just reached it after a few days of hard work. Now I gotta shave one more byte and then I’m done :)

 I will release the source once I am finished. I do new stuff and again no tools can read my .exe file, not even my own diSlib64… bammer.

Stay Tuned :) blee

TinyPE Made The World a Safer Place, did it?

Saturday, August 25th, 2007

It’s pretty cool to see after a long while since I’ve started that project that many AV’s now find the concept of Tiny PE as a virus or a risky application. On the other hand, it’s not a virus, so why do you alert about it? But most people think of the Tiny PE project, specifically what I started – was to download a file from the Internet and execute it. So it came out that the PE header was really fragile and yet it worked for Windows. So most AV’s and disassemblers didn’t even manage to parse it. That was only a side effect, later on, it was used with WebDAV to download the file directly by the Windows Loader using the name of a DLL as a URL(!), a real ownage.

So now I see that the link to the file my proof of concept code downloads is “censored” by some AV’s. My code is really inocent, will open a mere message box. But I guess you can imagine where it can end. Here’s the output of some AV:

http://ragestorm.net/tiny/_SANITIZED_    # void
Where the original file URL is: http://ragestorm.net/tiny/tiny3.exe

So it seems like it really made the world, or to be accurate the Internet, a safer place…although it wasn’t my real intention, because it was all started as a small bet with a friend and now see where it ended. Respect.

PS: to be really accurate when I say AV I mean malware scanning systems.

Common PE-Parsing Pitfalls

Sunday, June 3rd, 2007

PE, or Portable-Executable is Windows’ executable format. Looking only at the PE , as opposed to the code inside, can teach you alot about the application. But sometimes the tools you use to parse the file don’t do their work well. I, hereby, want to show a few problems about this kind of tools. As a matter of fact, .DLL and .SYS are also PE files under Windows, so I consider them the same when talking about PE files.

  1. If the Export-Directory offset points to a garbage pointer, Windows will still load the PE and run it successfully. It will get crazy and probably crash only when you try to GetProcAddress on this file. You can use this to render some tools unuseful but the file is still valid and runnable. Don’t confuse with Import-Directory which is necessary for loading the PE.
  2. Another annoying thing, whether the so-called “PE-Standard” states it or not, is the way of RVA (relative-virtual -address) offsets. RVA offset is the distance from the beginning of the file in memory to some specific field or section. Most people treat these RVA’s as if they must point into a section. But in reality RVA’s can point anywhere in the memory mapped file. They can even be negative numbers, (at least, as long as they still point to valid memory of the file). The problem is, most tools try to find the pointee field/section by scanning the sections list, but alas, it might be a valid RVA, which points to no section, but another part in the memory mapped file, for example, the MZ header… While Windows load these files well, some tools cannot parse them.
  3.  The most interesting problem that I found myself, not sure if anyone used it before, was changing the section’s File-Offset to be mis-aligned. The File-Offset is actually rounded down to a sector size (that’s 512 bytes) no matter what. So adding some number to the original valid File-Offset of the code section will fool some tools to read the code from that offset, instead of the rounded offset. Guess what happens? You disassemble the code from a wrong address and everything messes up. Even the mighty IDA had this bug. I introduced this technique in my Tiny PE Challenge. It seems most anti-virus software couldn’t chew up this file back then when I released it…Not sure about nowadays.
  4.  While researching for Tiny PE, Matthew Murphy hinted out that you can load files from the Internet with feeding it with a raw URL of the PE file. Later on it was extended such that Windows’ loader will use WebDAV to load an imported .DLL from the Internet! Think of an imported library with the following name \\127.0.0.1\my.dll inside the PE file itself. This one seemed to be a real blow to the AV industry. It means you can write an empty PE file which will have this special import thingy and gets it off the Internet. For samples you can check it out here, which covers Tiny PE (not my ones) very nicely.

The bottom line is that the Windows’ loader is kinda robust and yet very permissive. It seems as virii can exploit many features the PE format has to offer while AV’s still don’t support some. I guess some of the tools (some are really popular) will get better with time. As for now, my PE parser library for Python, diSlib64 seems to do the job quite well.