So, de beency bouncy burger, eh?

A colleague found this decoder called CyberChef, which I wish to bookmark and share with you. You may find it useful, too. I hear it can be downloaded as a standalone web page if you wish to audit it and then use it privately for opsec reasons, offline analysis, etc.

https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/

Børk, børk, børk!

This one weird trick for decoding DLL malware strings

TL;DR: argtracker and ctypes. It's the ctypes part that surprised me. Read on to see why.

This procedure can make light work of decoding strings in a DLL that has a horrifying string decoder or contains a metric ton of strings. The first stage leans on code that's already out there, with a bit of duct tape to get to the second stage; the second stage is to load your malware and call into it. There's just one stick-in-the-mud limitation: it has to be a file you can load into your address space using LoadLibrary, such as a DLL. Otherwise, you have to use a different kind of tool (I'll discuss this later).

First of all, gather all the strings you want to decode. Jay Smith wrote a very cool tool for this that uses Vivisect to emulate code and locate arguments. It's called argtracker. Don't duplicate it like I was starting to do with idaapi. Please, for the love of all that is lazy, just download it and get it installed.

The IDA Python script below is basically the code from the FireEye blog with a second function added to print all the encoded strings out so you can feed them to the second stage of this procedure. If your strings aren't printable prior to decoding, then you'll need to change this up a bit.

import vivisect
import flare.argtracker as c_argtracker
import flare.jayutils as c_jayutils

# Obtain the address where each argument is referenced by the decoder along
# with the offset that was referenced
def get_first_push_arg(decoder):
    ret = []
    vw = c_jayutils.loadWorkspace(c_jayutils.getInputFilePath())
    tracker = c_argtracker.ArgTracker(vw)
    xrefs = idautils.CodeRefsTo(decoder, 1)
    for xref in xrefs:
        argslist = tracker.getPushArgs(xref, 1)
        for argdict in argslist:
            va_at, offset = argdict[1]
            ret.append(argdict[1])
    return ret

# Now go get each string
def print_va_off_and_contents(pushed_args):
    print('refva, off, argcontents')
    for (va_at, offset) in pushed_args:
        print(hex(va_at) + ', ' + hex(offset) + ', ' + GetString(offset, -1, 0))
        # https://www.hex-rays.com/products/ida/support/idadoc/283.shtml
        # 0 <= ASCSTR_C
        # 3 <= ASCSTR_UNICODE

Provide your decoder's virtual address to get_first_push_arg, and then supply the returned list to print_va_off_and_contents to get something you can massage into shape for the second stage. Yes, I know, I'm using print instead of Python's logging module. The title of this blog was actually going to have the word "lazy" in it. Maybe it still should. Anyway...

Second and final step: load the malware and call its decoder. The interesting thing I learned is that Python ctypes can call non-exported functions. What a happy surprise! First, you have to define a function prototype, then you obtain a callable by hooking that prototype to an address in your binary where the function lives. There are prototypes for stdcall (WINFUNCTYPE) and cdecl (CFUNCTYPE). We're using stdcall. Here's a convenient snippet along with the string decoding goodness.

from ctypes import *

# Modify all this
offset = 0x4321                             # Decoder offset in your mal DLL
strings = [                                 # Populate from stage 1 (above)
    [0x10001234, "ABCdef"],
    [0x10005678, "ZYX990"],
    ...
]
dll = cdll.my_malware_dll                   # Modify to load your DLL
prototype = WINFUNCTYPE(c_char_p, c_char_p) # Stdcall, accepts & returns char*

# Leave this alone
string_decoder_addr = dll._handle + offset
decode = prototype(string_decoder_addr);

for (va, s) in strings:
    print(hex(va) + ' ' + s + ' -> ' + decode(s))

Simple, dimple. Paste the strings from IDA Pro into this script, ctypes loads and calls into the malware, and Bob's your uncle. For extra credit, you can update this script to emit another script that will create the appropriate comments or bookmarks in IDA Pro. This ctypes procedure works great for DLLs. Unfortunately, next time, it'll probably be an EXE and not a DLL. For those cases, you'll have to adapt this to a different tool, such as flare-dbg, to control malware execution and feed it the strings you want to decode. I'll talk more about tools and techniques for this another time.

Script Kitties Early Trick or Treat, Part 2

I promised a treat. Well, as scripts go, this will probably be like the time you went trick-or-treating as a kid and the old couple gave you three pennies and then you walked down the street and realized the pennies seemed to smell bad, but hey, it's money you didn't have before, so what the hay. It's not quite that bad, it's just I wrote it in 2006 and I didn't do much to bring it into modern times. But, here we go...

In 2006, PowerShell was just about to be released and around the same time I was thinking, darn it, wouldn't it be easier to experiment with VBScript if they had given me a command line? So I made one.

As it turns out, some malware is written in VBScript, so this came in handy a while back for me to decode a few lazily "encoded" strings that were assembled using the VBScript Chr() function and string concatenation. It let me figure out what COM objects were being created and move on with my life, so maybe it'll be useful to you.

I also added the ability to switch to JScript, because people also write malware in JScript, so hell, why not.

Here's a little demo:

You're wishing I just gave you the pennies now, aren't you.

Yeah, that's it. If you look at the code, you'll find out why it stinks just like those pennies. But it serves its purpose. So, enjoy!

Here's the code: https://github.com/strictlymike/eval-hta

B64

If you do web application work or malware analysis, you're bound to run into base64-encoded data.  For debugging purposes, it can be useful to decode (and encode) this data.  Linux has a utility named base64 for such things.  Windows does not, but the .NET System.Text namespace contains at least two relevant functions:

Convert.ToBase64String(byte []);
Convert.FromBase64String(string);

With not much work, you can create a quick utility like the base64 utility in Linux, but for Windows.  You can also use the .NET clipboard APIs to make the utility capable of conveniently translating data directly within the clipboard.

Featured here is a quickie utility for working with base64 encoding in various formats (command-line arguments, standard input/output, and clipboard).

The utility has issues encoding and decoding itself because it uses ReadLine() and doesn't read the entire input stream.  Perhaps using OpenStandardInput().Read(...) would alleviate this.  In any case, the example is provided as-is.

Source code here: https://github.com/strictlymike/EncodingUtils