Didier Stevens

Thursday 28 January 2021

Update: XORSelection.1sc Version 6.0

Filed under: 010 Editor,Encryption,Malware,My Software — Didier Stevens @ 0:00

I released an update to my 010 Editor script XORSelection.1sc.

010 is a binary editor with a scripting engine. XORSelection.1sc is a script I wrote years ago, that will XOR-encode a (partial) file open in the editor.

The first version just accepted a printable, arbitrary-length string as XOR-key. Later versions accepted an hexadecimal key too, and introduced various options.

With version 6.0, I add support for a dynamic XOR-key. That is a key that changes while it is being used. It can change, one byte at-a-time, before or after each XOR operation at byte-level is executed.

Hence option cb means change before, and ca means change after. Watch this video to understand exactly how the key changes (if you want to skip the part explaining my script XORSelection, you can jump directly to the dynamic XOR-key explanation).

 

I made this update to my XORSelection script, because I had to “manually” decode a Cobalt Strike beacon that was XOR-encoded with a changing XOR key (it is part of a WebLogic server attack). Later I included this decoding in my Cobalt Strike beacon analysis tool 1768.py.

The decoding shellcode is in the first 62 bytes (0x3E) of the file:

After the shellcode comes the XOR-key, the size and the beacon:

We can decode the beacon size, that is XOR-encoded with key 0x3F0882FB, as follows. First we select the bytes to be decoded:

Then we launch 010 Editor script XORSelection.1sc:

Provide the XOR key (prefix 0x is to indicate that the key is provide as hexadecimal byte values):

And then, after pressing OK, the bytes that contain the beacon size are decoded by XOR-ing them with the provided key:

This beacon size (bytes 00 14 04 00) is a little-endian, 32-bit integer: 0x041400.

To decode the beacon, we select the encoded beacon and launch script XORSelection.1sc again:

This time, we need to provide an option to change the XOR-decoding process. We press OK without entering a value, this will make the next prompt appear, where we can provide options:

The option we need to use to decode this Cobalt Strike beacon, is cb: change before.

In the next prompt, we can provide the XOR-key:

And we end up with the decoded beacon (you can see parts of the PE file that is the beacon):

Remark that you can enter “h” at the option prompt, to get a help screen:

I made this video explaining how to use this new option, and also explaining how the XOR key is changed exactly when using option change before (cb) or change after (ca).

If you want to skip the part explaining my script XORSelection, you can jump directly to the dynamic XOR-key explanation.

XORSelection_V6_0.zip (https)
MD5: C1872C275B59E236906D38B2302F3F4B
SHA256: 1970A506299878FAC2DDD193F9CE230FD717854AC1C85554610DDD95E04DE9E9

 

Tuesday 19 January 2021

Video: Maldoc Analysis With CyberChef

Filed under: maldoc,Malware,video — Didier Stevens @ 0:00

In this video, I show how to analyze a .doc malicious document using CyberChef only. This is possible, because the payload is a very long string that can be extracted without having to parse the structure of the .doc file with a tool like oledump.py.

I pasted the recipe on pastebin here.

Friday 22 May 2020

Update: oledump.py Version 0.0.50

Filed under: maldoc,Malware,My Software,Update — Didier Stevens @ 0:00

This new version brings updates to plugin plugin_biff.py.

This plugin can now produce a CSV list of cell values and formulas (option -c) or a JSON file of values and formulas (option -j).

Cell references are in RC format (row-column), but can also be produced in letters-numbers format (LN, option -r LN).

CSV or JSON output can be piped into my ad-hoc decoding programs.


oledump_V0_0_50.zip (https)
MD5: 30EB6A0E0924E72350B268ADDE4E4EC7
SHA256: 870167AE5576B169EB52572788D04F1FFCEC5C8AFDEBCC59FE3B8B01CBDE6CD9

Wednesday 1 April 2020

April 1st 2020: FlashPix File With VBA Code

Filed under: Hacking,Malware — Didier Stevens @ 0:00

Last year, there was some misunderstanding regarding Office Documents with VBA code mistakenly identified as FlashPix picture files.

The FlashPix picture format is an old format, based on the Compound File Binary Format (what I like to call OLE files). It has no support for VBA code at all (it doesn’t support any embedded scripting).

However, since it is an ole file, it’s technically possible to add storages and streams containing VBA code. This code can never execute, because the FlashPix specifications does not support it, and hence there are no image viewers that would recognize and execute this code.

So I took a FlashPix image (3d996a887c4a1b5b5ce70528f6bb4508). Here you can see the streams it contains:

And then I took a malicious AutoCAD drawing, and copied the VBA streams and storages into the FlashPix file:

Giving me this file 5040ef90824371a0bd0acaa36263553b.When I submitted this file to VirusTotal a couple of months ago, the AV detection ratio was 29/59. Which is far better than the other “AV-alert pictures” that I created.

If you are in need of a benign file that will trigger anti-virus, I shared this FlashPix PoC on the new malware sharing service Malware Bazaar.

Monday 30 March 2020

mimikatz Is My New EICAR

Filed under: Malware — Didier Stevens @ 0:00

I helped a friend creating picture files to be detected by anti-virus. They are not malicious: they don’t execute code neither trigger a vulnerability.

The EICAR test file is detected by many anti-virus programs, except when it is appended to arbitrary files (this is according to specs).

Starting with a one-pixel JPEG and PNG file, I append the EICAR test file. And with a JPEG file, I can also insert the EICAR file as a comment:

The detection scores on VirusTotal show that these files are not detected by many anti-virus programs:

  • JPEG + EICAR: 6/55
  • PNG + EICAR: 7/58
  • JPEG + EICAR comment: 2/57

That wasn’t good enough for my friend, she needed something with a higher detection score.

Since several years now, there is a Windows program that triggers many anti-virus programs: mimikatz.

When I try mimikatz with picture files, I get better detection scores than for the EICAR test file (as I expected):

  • JPEG + MIMIMATZ.EXE: 19/58
  • PNG + MIMIMATZ.EXE: 15/57
  • JPEG + MIMIMATZ.DLL: 12/57

 

And I have a picture file with even higher detection scores, but you’ll have to wait until April Fools day for the details 😉 .

Monday 6 January 2020

Analysis Of Unusual ZIP Files

Filed under: Malware,My Software — Didier Stevens @ 0:00

Intrigued by a blog post from SpiderLabs on a special ZIP file they found, I took a closer look myself.

That special ZIP file is a concatenation of 2 ZIP files, the first containing a single PNG file (with extension .jpg) and the second a single EXE file (malware). Various archive managers and security products handle this file differently, some “seeing” only the PNG file, others only the EXE file.

My zipdump.py tool reports the following for this special ZIP file:

zipdump.py is essentially a wrapper for Python’s zipfile module, and this module parses ZIP files “starting from the end of the file”. That’s why it finds the second ZIP file (appended to the first ZIP file), containing the malicious EXE file.

To help with the analysis of such special/malformed ZIP files, I added an option (-f –find) to zipdump. This option scans the content of the provided file looking for ZIP records. ZIP records start with ASCII string PK followed by 2 bytes to indicate the record type (byte values less than 16).

Here I use option “-f list” to list all PK records found in a ZIP file containing a single text file:

This is how a normal ZIP file containing a single file looks on the inside.

The file starts with a “local file header”, a PK record that starts with ASCII characters PK followed by bytes 0x03 and 0x04 (that’s 50 4B 03 04 in hexadecimal). In zipdump’s report, such a PK record is identified with PK0304. This header is followed by the contained file (usually compressed).

Then there is a “central directory header”, a PK record that starts with ASCII characters PK followed by bytes 0x01 and 0x02 (that’s 50 4B 01 02 in hexadecimal). In zipdump’s report, such a PK record is identified with PK0102. This header contains an offset pointing to the corresponding PK0304 record.

And at the end of the ZIP file, there is a “end of central directory”, a PK record that starts with ASCII characters PK followed by bytes 0x05 and 0x06 (that’s 50 4B 05 06 in hexadecimal). In zipdump’s report, such a PK record is identified with PK0506. This header contains an offset pointing to the first PK0102 record.

A ZIP file containing 2 files looks like this, when scanned with zipdump’s option -f list:

Starting with 2 PK0304 records (one for each contained file), followed by 2 PK0102 records, and 1 PK0506 record.

Armed with this knowledge, we take a look at our malicious ZIP file:

We see 2 PK0506 records, and this is unusual.

We see the following sequence of records twice: PK0304, PK0102, PK0506.

From our previous examples, we can now understand that this sample contains 2 ZIP files.

Remark that zipdump assigned an index to both PK0506 records: 1 and 2. This index can be used to select one of the 2 ZIP files for further analysis. Like in this example, where I select the first ZIP file:

Using option “-f 1” (in stead of “-f list”) selects the first ZIP file in the provide sample, and lists its content.

It can then be further analyzed with zipdump like usual, for example, selecting the first file (order.jpg) inside the first ZIP file for an hex/ascii dump:

Likewise, “-f 2” will select the second ZIP file found inside the sample:

-f is a new option that I added for special/malformed ZIP files, but this is a work in progress, as there are many ways to malform ZIP files.

For example, I created a PoC malformed ZIP file that contains a single file, with reversed PK record order. Here is the output for the normal and “reversed” zip files (malformed, e.g. PK records order reversed):

This file can be opened with Windows Explorer, but there are tools and libraries than can not handle it. Like Python’s zipfile module:

I will further develop zipdump to handle malformed ZIP files as best as possible.

The current version (zipdump 0.0.16) is just a start:

  • it parses only 3 PK record types (PK0304, PK0102 and PK0506), other types are ignored
  • it does minimal parsing of these records: for example, there is no parsing/checking of offsets in this version

And finally, I also created a video showing how to use this new feature:

Monday 16 December 2019

Analyzing .DWG Files With Embedded VBA Macros

Filed under: maldoc,Malware — Didier Stevens @ 0:00

AutoCAD’s drawing files (.dwg) can contain VBA macros. The .dwg format is a proprietary file format. There is some documentation, for example here.

When VBA macros are stored inside a .dwg file, an OLE file is embedded inside the .dwg file. There’s a quick-and-dirty way to find this embedded file inside the .dwg file: search for magic sequence D0CF11E0.

My tool cut-bytes.py can be used to search for the first occurrence of byte sequence D0CF11E0 and extract all bytes starting from this sequence until the end of the .dwg file. This can be done with cut-expression [D0CF11E0]: and pipe the result into oledump.py, like this:

Next, oledump can be used to conduct the analysis as usual, for example by extracting the VBA macro source code:

There is also a more structured approach to locate the embedded OLE file inside a .dwg file. When one looks at a .dwg file with a hexadecimal editor, the following can be seen:

First there is a magic sequence identifying this as a .dwg file: AC1032. This sequence varies with the file format version, but since many, many years, it starts with AC10. You can find more details regarding this magic sequence here and here.

At position 0x24 (36 decimal), there is a 32-bit little-endian integer. This is a pointer to the embedded OLE file (this pointer is NULL when no OLE file with VBA macros is embedded).

In our example, this pointer value is 0x00008080. And here is what can be found at this position inside the .dwg file:

First there is a 16-byte long header. At position 8 inside this header, there is a 32-bit little-endian integer that represents the length of the embedded file. 0x00001C00 in our example. And after the header one can find the embedded OLE file (notice magic sequence D0CF11E0).

This information can then be used to extract the OLE file from the .dwg like, like this:

Achieving exactly he same result as the quick-and-dirty method. The reason we don’t have to figure out the length of embedded OLE the file using the quick-and-dirty method, is that oledump ignores all bytes appended to an OLE file.

I will adapt my oledump.py tool to extract macros directly from .dwg files, without the need of a tool like cut-bytes.py, but I will probably implement something like the quick-and-dirty method, as this method would potentially work for other file formats with embedded OLE files, not only .dwg files.

 

Tuesday 12 November 2019

Steganography and Malware

Filed under: Malware,My Software — Didier Stevens @ 0:00

I was reading about malware using WAV files and steganography to download payloads without triggering detection systems.

For example, here is a WAV file with a hidden, embedded PE file. The PE file is encoded in the least significant bit of 16-bit integers that encode PCM sound.

I was wondering how I could extract this embedded file with my tools. There was no easy solution, because many of my tools operate on byte streams, but here I have to operate on a bit stream. So I made an update to my format-bytes.py tool.

Using my tool file-magic.py, I get confirmation that this is a sound file (.WAV) with 16-bit PCM data.

And here is an ASCII/HEX dump of the beginning of the file made with cut-bytes.py:

The data chunk starts with magic sequence ‘data’ (in yellow), followed by the size of the data chunk (in green), and then the data itself: 16-bit, little-endian signed integers (in red).

To extract the least significant bit of each 16-bit, little-endian signed integer and assemble them into bytes, I use the latest version of format-bytes.py.

This is the command that I use:

format-bytes.py -a -f “bitstream=f:<H,b:0,j:<” #c#[‘data’]+8: DB043392816146BBE6E9F3FE669459FEA52A82A77A033C86FD5BC2F4569839C9.wav.vir

With option -f, I specify a bitstream format.

f:<H means that the format of the data is little-endian (<), unsigned 16-bit integers (H). I could also specify a signed 16-bit integer (h), but this doesn’t matter here, as I’m not going to use the sign of the integers.

b:0 means that I extract the least-significant bit (position 0) of each 16-bit integer.

j:< means that I assemble (join) these bits into bytes from least significant to most significant (<).

The data starts 8 bytes into the data chunk, e.g. 8 bytes after magic sequence ‘data’. I define this with cut-expression #c#[‘data’]+8:.

When I run this command, and perform an ASCII dump, I get this output for the beginning of the stream:

I can indeed see an executable (MZ), but it is preceded by 4 bytes. These 4 bytes are the length of the embedded file. As described in the article, the length is big-endian encoded. Hence I use a similar command to extract the length, but with j:>, as can be seen here:

The length is 733696 bytes, and this matches the IOCs from the article.

Then I use my tool pecheck.py to search for PE files inside the byte stream (-l P), like this:

MD5 7cb0e1e2cf4a9bf450a350a759490057 is indeed the hash of the malicious DLL encoded in this WAV file.

 

 

 

 

 

Monday 21 October 2019

Quickpost: ExifTool, OLE Files and FlashPix Files

Filed under: Forensics,maldoc,Malware,Quickpost — Didier Stevens @ 0:00

ExifTool can misidentify VBA macro files as FlashPix files.

The binary file format of Office documents (.doc, .xls) uses the Compound File Binary Format, what I like to refer as OLE files. These files can be analyzed with my tool oledump.py.

Starting with Office 2007, the default file format (.docx, .docm, .xlsx, …) is Office Open XML: OOXML. It’s in essence a ZIP container with XML files inside. However, VBA macros inside OOXML files (.docm, .xlsm) are not stored as XML files, they are still stored inside an OLE file: the ZIP container contains a file with name vbaProject.bin. That is an OLE file containing the VBA macros.

This can be observed with my zipdump.py tool:

oledump.py can look inside the ZIP container to analyze the embedded vbaProject.bin file:

And of course, it can handle an OLE file directly:

When ExifTool is given a vbaProject.bin file for analysis, it will misidentify it as a picture file: a FlashPix file.

That’s because when ExifTool doesn’t have enough metadata or an identifying extension to identify an OLE file, it will fall back to FlashPix file detection. That’s because FlashPix files are also based on the OLE file format, and AFAIK ExifTool started out as an image tool:

That is why on VirusTotal, vbaProject.bin files from OOXML files with macros, will be misidentified as FlashPix files:

When the extension of a vbaProject.bin file is changed to .doc, ExifTool will misidentify it as a Word document:

ExifTool is not designed to identify VBA macro files (vbaProject.bin). These files are not Office documents, neither pictures. But since they are also OLE files, ExifTool tries to guess what they are, based on the extension, and if that doesn’t help, it falls back to the FlashPix file format (based on OLE).

There’s no “bug” to fix, you just need to be aware of this particular behavior of ExifTool: it is a tool to extract information from media formats, when it analyses an OLE file and doesn’t have enough metadata/proper file extension, it will fall back to FlashPix identification.

 

Quickpost info

Monday 30 September 2019

Update Of My PDF Tools

Filed under: maldoc,Malware,My Software,PDF,Update — Didier Stevens @ 19:16

This is an update of my PDF tools.

There are a couple of bug fixes for pdf-parser and pdfid.

And 2 new features in pdf-parser, inspired by a private training on maldoc analysis I gave last week. I often get good ideas from my students, and sometimes, even I get a good idea in class 🙂 .

Option -o can now be used to select multiple objects: separate the indices by a comma.

There’s a new environment variable, PDFPARSER_OPTIONS, that can be used to provide extra options you want to include with each execution of pdf-parser.py. This is useful for option -O, an option to parse stream objects.

It’s actually best to always parse stream objects, i.e. always use option -O. But I decided not to make this an option that is on by default, so that the behavior of pdf-parser would remain unchanged. I consider this important for the many people that rely on a predictable behavior of pdf-parser, like teachers and students of infosec trainings where my tools are used/mentioned.

However, always including option -O is tedious and error prone. So now you can have best of both worlds, by defining an environment variable with name PDFPARSER_OPTIONS and value -O.

And finally, I started to add a man page (option -m), like I do with many of my other tools. This is a work in progress: for the moment, it points to my free PDF analysis e-book that explains the use of pdfid and pdf-parser.

pdf-parser_V0_7_3.zip (https)
MD5: 7EB1713631D255B36BC698CD2422C7EB
SHA256: D4D5AC9C26A9D8FEF65CE58A769D3F64A737860DC26606068CCDD3F04FDEA0D7

pdfid_v0_2_6.zip (https)
MD5: 9CCE332914A6C76410F04B7C35DA3155
SHA256: 95F7C91EEFB561F3F3BE9809ED339D85E7109BAA7E128EF056651EE018DBDBA0

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