Push the Red Button

When malicious, kernel-level code is installed on the system, one action it may take is to hook various system services. What this means is that it takes some standard piece of operating system functionality and replaces it with its own code, allowing it to alter the way all other programs use the OS. For example, it may hook functions involved in opening registry keys, and modify their output so as to hide registry keys the rootkit uses. As system calls are the primary interface between user and kernel mode, the system call table is a popular place to do such hooking. It's worth noting that many security products also make heavy use of hooking. One common example is antivirus software; among the many functions it hooks is NtCreateProcess (used, as the name suggests, to start a new process) so that it can do its on-demand scanning of any newly launched programs. For this reason, it's not safe to assume that any hooking of system calls is malicious; in fact, some of the most su...

This one's for all the command line lovers out there: I'm happy to release volshell , an interactive shell built on Python and designed with memory analysis research in mind. I gave a demo of this at my OMFW talk, "Interactive Memory Exploration with Volatility"; since it was more of a live demo, I don't have slides from that, but you can find my notes here . You should be able to follow the notes as a sort of walkthrough that will get you up and running with volshell, and introduce some of the more advanced features. Briefly, here are some of the features of volshell: Shell is a full Python interpreter, so all the power of Python can be leveraged. Uses Volatility 1.3 object model for easy access to data structures in memory. Can use iPython for the underlying shell if available, which enables some nice features. Commands modelled after WinDbg. Works with any memory image format that Volatility supports (dd, crash, vmem, hibernation file) To use it, just downlo...

In the course of an investigation, it may be critical to be able to link up a process that's running to a particular user account. Particularly in a multi-user environment such as Windows Terminal Server, this isn't always as easy as checking who was logged in at the time. Luckily, each process in Windows has an associated token , a chunk of metadata that describes what Security Identifier (SID) owns the process and what privileges have been granted to it. As Larry Osterman explains , A SID is essentially a unique ID that is assigned to a user or group, and is broken into several parts: the revision (currently always set to 1), the identifier authority (describing what authority created the SID, and hence how to interpret the subauthoriries), and finally a list of subauthorities . In general, when users see SIDs (which they rarely do), they are in what's called the Security Descriptor Definition Language (SDDL) form. This is a string that looks like: S-1-5-21-1957994488...

After tons of hard work by a lot of people (including me), Volatility 1.3 has been released to the world at large. AAron has a blog post up with all the juicy details, including a list of new features. For my part, I want to take this opportunity focus on a couple new things that I think are really cool. They're mostly developer-focused, so if you have no interest in adding new capabilities to Volatility, you can skip the rest of this entry and just head over to AAron's post to see all the new modules and functionality. The first feature I want to point out is the new plugin system. Basically, rather than creating a new module and then editing vmodules.py to add new commands to Volatility, you can now just create a class extending forensics.commands.command with the code you want to run, drop it into a file, and put that file into the memory_plugins directory, and Volatility will pick it up and see it as a new command that can be run. This means that anyone can just give out ...

It's been quite a while since I wrote any new blog posts. This isn't entirely because I've been lazy; rather, I've picked up and relocated to sunny (and often hot and humid) Atlanta, Georgia to start the PhD program at Georgia Tech . I'm going to be working on lots of cool stuff with the Georgia Tech Information Security Center . Now that I'm here and starting to get settled in, you can expect the blog posts to start up again. Particularly with the forthcoming release of Volatility 1.3, I'm going to have a lot of new plugins and functionality to blog about. As a teaser, here are some of the things I've got in the works: getsids.py -- get the SID (kind of like a user ID in unix) that owns each process moddump.py -- extract loaded kernel modules from memory unloaded_modules.py -- list recently unloaded kernel modules ssdt.py -- show the System Service Descriptor Table, along with the kernel module that owns the memory. This can be used to detect hookin...