Didier Stevens

Monday 31 March 2008

<!– Hiding Inside Wikipedia –>

Filed under: Forensics — Didier Stevens @ 15:00

It seems that each time I attend Black Hat, I get some new steganography idea.

It’s easy to hide data inside the Wikipedia pages. But before I explain how, understand that the general principle of what I will explain applies to most sites where users can edit content. They can all be used as a covert channel, but Wikipedia has become so common that it would have passed under my radar when performing a forensic investigation. But not anymore.

You can use the Wikipedia Sandbox to experiment while avoiding the wrath of the Wiki gods.

Select the edit this page tab to start editing the article:

wikipedia-0004.png

Prepare the data you want to store on Wikipedia by converting it to a base64 representation (you can ZIP and/or encrypt it before converting it to base64). Insert the base64 data as a hidden comment inside the page:

wikipedia-0005.png

Save your changes first, and then undo your changes via the history tab:

wikipedia-0006b.png

That’s it! From now on, you can retrieve your data by comparing versions:

wikipedia-0008.png

wikipedia-0009.png

So how can you detect and prevent this? Head over to the PaulDotCom Community Blog for the answer, where I’m a guest blogger.

Wednesday 19 March 2008

bpmtk: Spying on IE

Filed under: Hacking,My Software — Didier Stevens @ 11:07

I was asked if it’s possible to intercept IE’s HTTPS requests. It is, it’s not difficult, and you don’t need admin rights to do it on your own processes. In other words, a malware doesn’t even need admin rights to spy on your IE process, if said malware is also running under your user account.

We need to hook the API calls to WinINet functions, like HTTPOpenRequest. We can do this by patching the Delayed Import Address Table of executables calling WinINet functions. In our case, to spy on IE, we need to patch the DIAT of urlmon.dll. One simple way to hook these API calls, is to develop a DLL that will patch the DIAT, diverting the calls to our own functions. Our functions will just call the original functions while intercepting the data.

Here is an example for HTTPOpenRequest:

wininet1.png

HookHTTPOpenRequestA is our hook function for HTTPOpenRequest. It will just output the flags, verb and objectname parameters to the debugger, and then call the original HTTPOpenRequest function with unmodified arguments (which we saved in variable OriginalHTTPOpenRequestA). BTW, if the declaration and use of OriginalHTTPOpenRequestA looks confusing to you, read the explanation of function pointers in C.

Patching the DIAT is easy, use the PatchDIAT function that I provide with my Basic Process Manipulation Tool Kit (it’s in iat.c).

wininet2.png

PatchDIAT needs the name of the executable we want to patch (urlmon.dll), the name of the API to patch (wininet.dll), the name of the function to patch (HttpOpenRequestA), the address of our hooking function (HookHttpOpenRequestA) and a variable to store the address of the original function (OriginalHttpOpenRequestA). PatchDIAT returns S_OK when patching was successful.

We package everything in a DLL, while hooking some other functions, like InternetReadFile (to intercept actual data), and then inject this DLL in IE with my toolkit:

wininet6.png

wininet7.png

I’ve stored a test file on my server: https://DidierStevens.com/files/temp/test.txt. When you browse to this test file with the patched IE, you’ll see this in Sysinternal’s DebugView:

wininet5.png

Lines 0 to 4 indicate the patching IE was successful.

Line 5 shows IE opening a connection to didierstevens.com on port 443 (that’s 1BB in hexadecimal).

Line 6 shows the preparation of an HTTPS GET request to file /files/temp/test.txt. Flags 00C00000 indicate HTTPS and keep-alive.

Line 7 shows that the call to InternetReadFile was successful and read 25 bytes (0x19).

Line 8 shows the actual data retrieved by IE: This is just a text file.

The next lines indicate we unloaded our DLL with success (thus undoing the patch).

As you can see, we can intercept data before it is encrypted by the HTTPS connection (/files/temp/test.txt) and after it is decrypted (This is just a text file.). This works because we patch the executable before it calls API functions that handle the encryption/decryption, so we get access to the unencrypted data.

I kept my demo DLL very simple to show you the basic principles. A complete spying program would have to hook more functions and tie all the data together to present it in a user friendly way.

It’s also simple to adapt my IE spying DLL to tamper with the data. For example, it could redirect IE to another web site by changing the lpszServerName argument before it calls the original InternetConnect function.

Wednesday 12 March 2008

bpmtk: DisableAMD

Filed under: Hacking,My Software,Reverse Engineering — Didier Stevens @ 0:43

Remember my DisableAMD post? In stead of patching the EXE file, you can also use my Basic Process Manipulation Tool Kit to patch the running process.

There is a small difficulty, however. The check for the DisableCMD key is done when CMD.EXE is started, so to be successful, we have to start the program and change the DisableCMD string in memory before the check is made. Sounds impossible? Not really, the CreateProcess function allows you to create a new process with its main thread in a suspended state (this means that the program is not running). This gives you the opportunity to change the string in memory before it is used.

Use the start statement to start a new process in suspended state:

start cmd.exe

Change the string in memory:

search-and-write module:. unicode:DisableCMD unicode:DisableAMD

The main thread will be resumed after the last statement was executed (search-and-write in our example):

start-cmd-w2k8.png

The cmd.exe window in the background was launched from the start menu (showing you that cmd.exe is disabled), while the cmd.exe window in the foreground was launched with the bpmtk (showing you the bypass of the GPO).

And did you notice that this screenshot is taken on a Windows 2008 server?

Next time, I’ll show some tricks to use the bpmtk in a restricted environment, like a Terminal Server.

Thursday 6 March 2008

bpmtk: Replacing Gpdisable

Filed under: Hacking,My Software,Reverse Engineering — Didier Stevens @ 8:52

Gpdisable is a tool to bypass group policy as a limited user, posted by Marc Russinovich on his blog when he was still the owner of Sysinternals. But now that Sysinternals is owned by Microsoft, the tool is not available anymore.

My Basic Process Manipulation Tool Kit can replace Gpdisable, I’ll show how and give you one more trick.

LikeMarc did, you can inject a DLL that will patch the IAT to subvert NtQueryValueKey, but I’ll leave this technique for an upcoming post.

My example doesn’t require you to program a DLL to inject: since we want to hide the TransparentEnabled registry key, we will just rename the key in the process memory of the programs that impose Software Restriction Policies on us (like explorer.exe). Here is the bpmtk config file to achieve this goal:

dll-name advapi32.dll
#rename TransparentEnabled to AransparentEnabled
search-and-write module:. unicode:TransparentEnabled ascii:A

This will patch each process you’ve rights to and who has loaded advapi32.dll (this DLL enforces SRP).

But as Mark writes in his blog, this will not work for running processes because they have already cached the value of TransparentEnabled and are thus not querying the registry anymore. This is why many people reported that Gpdisable didn’t work for them. Gpupdate /force will force a refresh of the policies, and invalidate the cache.

But if you’re in a restricted environment, there’s a chance you’re prevented from doing a gpupdate. Here’s another way: set the variable _g_bInitializedFirstTime to 0, this will also invalidate the cache. For advapi32.dll version 5.1.2600.2180, this variable is at address 77E463C8. Our script becomes:

dll-name advapi32.dll
#rename TransparentEnabled to AransparentEnabled
search-and-write module:. unicode:TransparentEnabled ascii:A
write version:5.1.2600.2180 hex:77E463C8 hex:00

Blog at WordPress.com.