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Showing posts from July, 2017

Breaking backwards compatibility: a 5 year old bug deep within Windows

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Microsoft has a great track record of maintaining support for legacy software running under Windows. There is an entire compatibility layer baked into the OS that is dedicated to fixing issues with decades old software running on modern iterations of Windows. To learn more about this application compatibility infrastructure, I'd recommend swinging over to Alex Ionescu's blog . He has a great set of posts describing the technical details on how user (even kernel ) mode shimming is implemented. With all of that said, it's an understatement to say that Microsoft takes backwards compatibility seriously. Occasionally, the humans at Microsoft make mistakes. Usually, though, they're very quick to address these problems. This blog post will go over an unnoticed bug that was introduced in Windows 8 with a documented Win32 API. At the time of this post, this bug is still present in Windows 10 (Creator's Update) and has been around for over 5 years. Forgotten Win32 AP

Loading kernel symbols - VMM debugging using VMware's GDB stub and IDA Pro - Part 2

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This article assumes you've read the first part of the series . In particular, at this point you should have successfully setup VMware's GDB stub and IDA Pro's GDB debugger. You should now be in a connected state and broken into IDA Pro's debugger GUI. Furthermore, the focus of this post is going to be exclusively on loading kernel symbols for 64-bit editions of Windows ( AMD64 ). Different operating systems (and different architectures of Windows) require slight modifications to the article's logic. Where's Waldo  ntoskrnl? The end goal The first and most important thing is to discover where the NT Kernel (ntoskrnl.exe) is loaded in memory since it's not at any fixed (static) address thanks to  address space layout randomization  (ASLR). We are then able to force IDA Pro to load symbol data (PDBs) at ntoskrnl's base address to have useful debugging information. From there, we can enumerate the linked list,  nt!PsLoadedModuleList , to figure ou

Setup - VMM debugging using VMware's GDB stub and IDA Pro - Part 1

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Sometimes you'll run into a situation that you can't analyze with a traditional kernel debugger like WinDbg. An example of such is trying to troubleshoot the runtime logic of PatchGuard (Microsoft's Kernel Patch Protection ). In situations like this, you need to bust out the heavy tools. VMware has built in support for remote debugging of virtual machines running inside it through a GDB stub. IDA Pro, the defacto disassembler that most reverse engineers have, includes a GDB debugger. Together these make for a very powerful combo. This article goes over how to setup VMware's GDB stub and how to connect to it using IDA Pro's GDB debugger.

Introduction to IA-32e hardware paging

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In this article, we explore the complexities and concepts behind Intel's 64-bit paging scheme, why we need paging in the first place, and some practical analysis of paging structures.

Setting up kernel debugging using WinDbg and VMware

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Setting up WinDbg for kernel-mode debugging is a fairly trivial process, however, it's easy to miss (or incorrectly configure) a step causing you to waste precious time.  In this post, I have written a tutorial that goes through the entire process of setting up WinDbg (and configuring symbol lookup) for kernel-mode debugging with VMware using a named pipe and a virtual serial connection .