Day 2: Entering VMX Operation, Explaining Implementation Requirements
Overview Today is the day of heavy details and implementation. There will be a lot of technical explanation and a lot of text. We’ll start off with a section explaining the need for some form of internal logging API because – well, having DbgPrint spammed throughout functions when validating certain control values is disgusting and […]
Day 1: Introduction to Virtualization, Type Definitions, and Support Testing
Overview In this article we’re going to introduce virtualization, the various forms of virtualization, terminology, and a high level view of the abstraction that is virtualization. We’ll also be building out a test function for support of virtual machine instructions, followed by defining structures to represent various architectural registers and components. The reason for using […]
Day 0: Virtual Environment Setup, Scripts, and WinDbg
Overview Today is the day you begin your wild journey into hypervisor development. It’s going to be miserable, rewarding, frustrating, and exciting – all at the same time. In this article, we accelerate head on into setting up our virtual environment using VMware (taking advantage of their nested virtualization), write scripts for quick stand-up and […]
5 Days to Virtualization: A Series on Hypervisor Development
Overview Next week, (10/29) I’ll be starting to publish a series that is written to aid new and interested readers with building, testing, and understanding type-2 hypervisor development. This hypervisor will be written for use on Intel processors with virtualization support. If you’re operating on an AMD chip, you may find some parts helpful, but […]
Superseding Driver Altitude Checks on Windows
It was brought to my attention that in an article on my former research portfolio[2] I mentioned another way to manipulate an unsigned driver and perform some black magic. This black magic is done by modifying a flag in the _DRIVER_OBJECT allowing for the loaded driver to supersede altitude checks, register callbacks both with the […]
Detecting Hypervisor Presence on Windows 10
Detecting a hypervisor on Windows 10 is relatively simple, but due to the simplistic nature of the currently published detection vectors it’s likely that they are also relatively simple to spoof or remove. In this article we’ll detail a few ways of detecting a hypervisors presence on Windows 10, determining if it’s a Microsoft hypervisor, […]
Hiding Drivers on Windows 10
Disclaimer: All experiments and development were performed on Windows 10 x64 (Version 1703, Build 15063.540). Any attempt to replicate results on a different version or operating system may yield inconsistent results. —– It’s a pretty common objective in the game hacking community to load and attempt to hide their kernel modules from prying eyes. The […]
Converting Virtual Linear Addresses to Physical Addresses
The processes of converting virtual address to physical addresses varies from architecture to architecture. This article lays out the process of converting a standard 64bit linear address on a processor operating in IA32e mode. It’s important to note this distinction because some constructs that exist for IA32e do not for IA32 mode (such as the […]
Custom GetProcAddress and GetModuleHandle Implementation (x64)
Reverse engineers know that the easiest way to break an application down to understand it’s internal operations involves using the import table and, of course, understanding assembly to some degree. In an effort to add a layer of indirection and in pursuit of understanding how the internal Windows routines operated I rewrote the famous, or […]