Applied Reverse Engineering Series
Series Overview This series is intended for readers who are interested in reverse engineering but have only opened a debugger a handful of times. If you have trouble with certain concepts of reverse engineering, tooling, disassembly or debugging then you’ve come to the right place. Starting from the ground up we’ll work our way to […]
Reading MSRs from UserMode
After speaking with some pals online about Windows 10’s policy requiring drivers to be digitally signed in order to load the lot of us began digging into tools that use signed drivers – you know… to see if there was any fun to be had with drivers that don’t validate UserMode addresses that are passed […]
Recovering Deleted Windows Files [Breakdown and Theory]
When you delete a file on Windows, specifically Windows 10 Professional x64, it is removed from the user’s view and placed in the recycle bin for permanent deletion. Once that permanent deletion is performed, some ask the question “is the file really gone?” The answer is no, not immediately, and even after permanent deletion it’s […]
Structure of Security Identifiers
Recently a friend of mine asked about an unknown user account associated with all files, new or old, with an unknown SID (security identifier) attached. I noted that this is common when local machines have had accounts that have since been removed. However, he then asked about the structure of that number so I figured […]
Usermode Debugger Check Prevention
It’s easy enough to use OllyDbg or any other debugger to bypass debugger checks, but any sort of anti-debugging technique that utilizes the time stamp counter such as QueryPerformanceCounter, GetTickCount, and others, can be bypassed by setting the 2nd bit in control register 4 (CR4) which disables the TimeStamp Counter from working for applications operating […]
Breaking Down System Routines #2 [NtQuerySystemInformation]
System Routine Overview NtQuerySystemInformation is a system routine that gathers system information specific to the class value provided. During this breakdown, we’ll look at it in much more depth because, like the previous system routine documented, it’s just a wrapper for an internal kernel routine that actually gathers the system information. However, the internal routine it […]
Breaking Down System Routines #1 [NtQuerySection]
NtQuerySection is a system routine for the Windows operating system that queries information related to a section object and provides the information regarding that object by filling a buffer passed to the function. As an important note, all disassembly and reversing took place on Windows 10 x64 Professional. It requires 4 arguments, 5 if you […]
Using Flags of RTL_USER_PROCESS_PARAMETERS for Anti-Debugging
OverviewThere are various flags in the PEB associated with a specific process such as the CrossProcessFlags, the BitField (4th member of the PEB), AppCompatFlags, and so forth. I’d always tried looking for differences in the flags when operating in a standard runtime environment vs. a debugged runtime environment and after many failed attempts to find […]