Didier Stevens

Wednesday 22 July 2009

The Ultimate Disaster Recovery Plan

Filed under: Encryption,My Software — Didier Stevens @ 20:34

The ultimate disaster recovery plan is not a corporate plan.

This plan is for your family, to help them take over from you, when you’re not able to take up your role in the family. Hopefully, this will only be a temporary situation, but you have to plan for the worse too: your demise.

List all critical tasks you perform for your family. Think about the information a family member needs to take over your tasks. Document this. Communicate this to your family members.

Most of this documentation is private but not confidential. You don’t want an outsider to read it, but it contains no real secrets. You’ll only want to use encryption for the real secrets, and communicate the key and decryption procedure to your family members and/or lawyer (or another trustworthy outsider). You don’t have to trust a single person with your key if you don’t want to, you can split it over several persons, like Cory Doctorow did.

2 years ago, a very good friend of mine died suddenly. That’s what motivated me to develop a html/javascript page with AES encryption to record and encrypt my will. The advantage of html/javascript is that it’s standalone and very portable.

When you open my Virtual Will page, it will detect that it contains no encrypted content, and display the following dialog:

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Use this dialog to create and encrypt your message.

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Copy all html code from the encrypt textbox, and save it as an html file. This html file is identical to the original, but it also contains your message encrypted with AES.

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Provide this document to your family members, together with the (partial) key. For example, you could burn it to a CD-ROM and use autorun to open the page automatically.

To decrypt it, open the html file:

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and enter the password:

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You can also use a Virtual Will page with ciphertext to create a new page or update your will: type encrypt in the password field, and you’ll see the encryption fields appear.

I obtained the JavaScript AES code from Chris Veness.

Some limitations:

  • Chris’ implementation doesn’t use a standard key derivation algorithm (and is limited to first 32 characters of the password)
  • the ciphertext is not compatible with the openssl format
  • it works with many browsers on different operating systems, but not on my S60 Nokia
  • get the enter key to work correctly

I’ll improve these limitations if my software proves to be useful.

Of course, you can use this html page to encrypt anything and then pass it along, it doesn’t have to be a disaster recovery plan.

Download: virtualwill.html

Tuesday 21 July 2009

Quickpost: More Picture-Taking with Python

Filed under: Hardware,My Software,Quickpost — Didier Stevens @ 9:24

Per @TimelessP’s request, here’s so more Python code that can be used for time-lapse photography.

It’s code I wrote to take surveillance pictures from IP-cameras:

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You have to update 2 config files with the data of your IP-cameras: vs.config and credentials.config. Fields in the config files are tab-separated.

vs.config contains the IP cameras, example:

Hall.jpg    http://192.168.1.1/IMAGE.JPG    -

First field is the prefix for the name when saving the picture (suffix is a timestamp). Second field is the URL to access the picture on the IP camera (depends on the model your using). Third field is a fixed name for the picture, use a hyphen (-) if not used.

credentials.config contains the passwords to access the IP-cameras, example:

192.168.1.1    admin    password

Download:

vs_v0_2.zip (https)

MD5: DB806B49705D544F4B928A8F76622125

SHA256: 042FA2CE1F5AEBD433D59B9D4755783E6CE58014FE59086C6A2A8E8781C63B45

Quickpost info

Wednesday 1 July 2009

Embedding and Hiding Files in PDF Documents

Filed under: My Software,PDF — Didier Stevens @ 6:28

My corrupted PDF quip inspired me to program another steganography trick: embed a file in a PDF document and corrupt the reference, thereby effectively making the embedded file invisible to the PDF reader.

The PDF specification provides ways to embed files in PDF documents. I’m releasing my Python program to create a PDF file with embedded file (I used make-pdf-embedded.py to create my EICAR.pdf).

Here’s how a PDF document with an embedded file looks like:

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/EmbeddedFiles points to the dictionary with the embedded files:

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As names defined in the PDF specification are case sensitive, changing the case changes the semantics: /Embeddedfiles has no meaning, and thus the PDF reader ignores it and doesn’t find the embedded file.

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Actually, I used this trick in my Brucon puzzle. I used the –stego option of make-pdf-embedded.py:

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Of course, once you know the stego trick, it’s easy to recover the embedded file: edit the PDF document with an hex editor and change the case back to /EmbeddedFiles.

But if you want to make it harder to detect, use PDF obfuscation techniques. Or embed the file twice with incremental updates. First version is the file you want to hide, second version is a decoy…

The PDF language offers so many features to hide and obfuscate data!

Download:

make-pdf_V0_1_2.zip (https)

MD5: 305D57692C27DD3CD91D8C85A3932948

SHA256: A030BBCB8B54137D8047A4CB5C350725599383A4B113CABBA8871AC221378C5B

Tuesday 30 June 2009

MessageBox Shellcode

Filed under: My Software — Didier Stevens @ 5:40

Per request, I release my assembly code I’ve used in my previous blogposts to display a message box when the injected shellcode gets executed. It’s nothing special, but it will save you some time when you need a similar program.

Assemble the code with nasm like this:

nasm -o sc-mba-hello.bin sc-mba-hello.asm

I use the DLL locating code published in The Shellcoder’s Handbook, you can find it in the include file sc-api-functions.asm. MessageBoxA is located in user32.dll, this dll has to be loaded in the process you’re injecting with sc-mba-hello.

sc-ods.asm is a similar program, calling OutputDebugStringA in stead of MessageBoxA.

Download:

my-shellcode_v0_0_1.zip (https)

MD5: F215B29BA3C8F24CFBA5C24BED65B68A

SHA256: EA1DB8028954CEB18B8AD2EB37CA6BA0CD7CDC6B9A64F10561382152701C013F

The shellcode:

sc-mba-hello

Monday 29 June 2009

Quickpost: Time Lapse Photography With a Nokia Mobile

Filed under: Hardware,My Software,Quickpost — Didier Stevens @ 2:20

Did you know Nokia mobile phones with the S60 platform can be programmed in Python? During my last holiday, I wrote a small program for time lapse photography with my mobile. Here is the result, showing tidal ebbs and flows in Saint-Vaast-la-Hogue and Cancale:

This is the Python program I wrote to take a picture every minute:

#!/usr/bin/python

__description__ = 'Tool to take pictures with a Nokia phone at regular intervals'
__author__ = 'Didier Stevens'
__version__ = '0.1.1'
__date__ = '2009/06/22'

"""

Source code put in public domain by Didier Stevens, no Copyright
https://DidierStevens.com
Use at your own risk

History:
 2009/06/17: start
 2009/06/22: refactoring

Todo:
 Get Threading to work
"""

import camera
import time
import os

timelapseFolder = 'e:\\timelapse\\'
sleepTime = 57

def TakeAndSavePicture():
    global timelapseFolder

    now = '%04d%02d%02d-%02d%02d%02d' % time.localtime()[0:6]
    pic = camera.take_photo()
    pic.save(os.path.join(timelapseFolder, now, '.jpeg'))
    print 'Picture taken: %s' % now

def Main():
    global timelapseFolder
    global sleepTime

    print 'Timelapse photography started'
    if not os.path.isdir(timelapseFolder):
        os.mkdir(timelapseFolder)
        print 'Timelapse folder created: %s' % timelapseFolder
    print 'Wait between pictures %d' % sleepTime
    while True:
        TakeAndSavePicture()
        time.sleep(sleepTime)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    Main()

And then I use Avisynth to combine the jpeg pictures in a movie like this (I join pictures 00001.jpg through 00197.jpeg, 5 per second and produce a 25 fps movie):

ImageSource("%05d.jpeg", 1, 197, 5).ChangeFPS(25)

Quickpost info

Thursday 25 June 2009

bpmtk: Injecting VBScript

Filed under: bpmtk,Hacking,My Software — Didier Stevens @ 7:03

Here’s a new trick: injecting VBScript in a process. I’ve developed a DLL that will create a COM instance of the VBScripting engine and let it execute a VBScript. Injecting this DLL in a running program results in execution of the VBScript in the context of the running program. Here’s an example where I wrote a VBScript to search and replace a string in the memory of the notepad process:

Here is part of the VBScript I developed to search and replace inside the memory of a process. It uses custom methods like Peek, Poke and Output that I’ve added to the scripting engine:

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I’ll provide more details in an upcoming blogpost on bpmtk version 0.1.5.0, but you can already download it here.

YouTube, Vimeo and hires Xvid.

Sunday 7 June 2009

Update: Disitool V0.3

Filed under: My Software,Update — Didier Stevens @ 23:15

Last January, I got a little challenge from @hdmoore via my Twitter account: add data to a signed executable without invalidating the Authenticode signature. I updated my Digital signature tool, but I realize now I had only announced the update on Twitter, not on my blog.

The trick is to increase the size of the image data directory for the digital signature and inject the extra data after the digital signature. This way, the Authenticode validation algorithm ignores the extra data, because it considers it to be part of the signature. Use Disitool’s new inject command:

disitool.py inject ms-patch.exe data.bin ms-patch-data.exe

The authenticode signature of ms-patch.exe will remain valid in ms-patch-data.exe, provided that the length of the injected data (file data.bin) is a multiple of 8.

You can use the paddata option to make the injected data size a multiple of 8 if it isn’t:

disitool.py inject --paddata ms-patch.exe data.bin ms-patch-data.exe

Disitool can be downloaded here.

Monday 1 June 2009

Quickpost: Sending WiFi Beacon Frames with an AirPcap Adapter

Filed under: My Software,Quickpost,WiFi — Didier Stevens @ 10:29

While preparing for my OSWP exam, I came across an unpublished Python program for the AirPcap adapter. I cleaned-it up a bit and here it is: apc-b

This program allows you to send out beacon frames, a very simple way to spoof WiFi access points.

This is the command to generate beacon frames on channel 6 for a couple of ESSIDs listed in file apc-b-2.txt:

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And here is Kismet on my N800 capturing these beacon frames:

kismet-n800

Quickpost info

Thursday 14 May 2009

Malformed PDF Documents

Filed under: Malware,My Software,PDF — Didier Stevens @ 7:55

For the sake of this post, I consider a PDF document malformed when it doesn’t observe the basic structure of a PDF document.

I’ve seen a couple of malicious, malformed PDF documents. The most recent was a malicious swine flu PDF document that contains another, bening, PDF document with information about the swine flu (obtained from the CDC site). This second PDF document is displayed to mislead the user while the exploit runs.

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This second PDF document is XOR-encoded and appended to the end of the malicious PDF document, making the malicious PDF document malformed (FYI: the PDF file format supports embedded files, but this wasn’t used here). A PDF reader like Adobe or Foxit has no problems opening this malformed PDF, because it scans a PDF document for the trailer (%%EOF) starting from the end of the document. Everything that follows this trailer and doesn’t adhere to the PDF syntax is just ignored.

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I’ve added some new features to my PDF tools to handle malformed PDF documents.

PDFiD

The new version of PDFiD has an –extra option. Like it names imply, use it to add extra analysis data to the PDFiD report. The extra option adds entropy calculations to the report:

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For a normal PDF file, expect the total entropy and the entropy of bytes inside stream objects to be close to the maximum value 8.0. This means that the distribution of byte values is close to random, which is characteristic of compressed and encrypted data.

Outside streams objects, the data appears much less random, and the entropy is much lower, usually around 4.0 or 5.0.

However, for malformed PDF documents, where data is added without using stream objects, the entropy outside stream objects is much higher. Here is the report for the malicious swine flu PDF:

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Another datum added to the report by using the –extra option is for the end-of-file marker %%EOF.

The “%%EOF” line mentions the number of times %%EOF appears in the document (more than once usually indicates incremental updates). “After last %%EOF” counts the number of bytes after the last %%EOF. This value will be not be zero when data has been appended.

pdf-parser

The previous versions of pdf-parser output a lot of “todo 10” data (an indication of malformed PDF data) when they parse a malformed PDF document. I’ve suppresed this behavior, you’ll need to use option –verbose to enable it from now on, should you need it. Since I first use PDFiD to check a PDF document before using pdf-parser, I don’t consider the “todo” output relevant anymore, as PDFiDs entropy and %%EOF report will tell me if a PDF document is malformed.

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But the other new option in pdf-parser, –extract, is more important. Example:

pdf-parser.py –extract payload.bin malformed.pdf

This option will extract all malformed data from malformed.pdf and write it to file payload.bin, giving you easy access to the embedded payload.

Samples

You can download a normal and malformed Hello World PDF file here to get familiarized with my updated tools. 4096 random bytes have been appended to the end of the PDF document to make it malformed.

Here is a last example when the entropy calculation can be handy even if the payload is stored inside a stream object:

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The reason the total entropy and entropy of bytes inside stream objects is very low here, is that this malicious PDF document has a payload with a very long, uncompressed NOP-sled (more than one million times 0x90).

Monday 11 May 2009

PDF Filter Abbreviations

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

@binjo ‘s tweet made me realize PDF filter abbreviations do apply to stream objects too, although the PDF reference document only defines them for inline images. Here are the abbreviations:

  • ASCIIHexDecode -> AHx
  • ASCII85Decode -> A85
  • LZWDecode -> LZW
  • FlateDecode -> Fl
  • RunLengthDecode -> RL
  • CCITTFaxDecode -> CCF
  • DCTDecode -> DCT

This means that, for example, a flatedecode filter for a stream object can not only be specified as /Filter /FlateDecode, but also as /Filter /Fl.

I updated my PDF-tools to support this.

And jprosco e-mailed me an update to my pdf-parser tool to support ASCIIHexDecode, because he had to analyze some malicious PDF documents that used it to encode the JavaScript.

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