Summerschool Aachen 2004/Malware Lab

Notes about Presentation

ELF Tools and others

• http://soua.net/elf.py
• http://michael.bacarella.com/projects/sograph/sograph-0.95/elf.py
• http://elfsh.devhell.org/
• http://directory.fsf.org/libs/misc/libelf.html (http://developers.sun.com/solaris/articles/elf.html)
• http://sourceforge.net/projects/elfio/
• http://www.kerneled.org/projects/elf/index.html
• http://www.z0mbie.host.sk/infelf.html
• ELF(5)
• readelf(1), from GNU binutils

Notes about Lab Session

more elf tools

• elfsh - elf shell

small quiz

There is a really small quiz consisting of just one question here.

Documenting the Lab Session

The Quiz, Question 1

The perl scripts execute the system call with the number 4, sys_write(), supplying a file descriptor of "1", which denotes stdout, the standard address of the ELF header of the binary (probably the perl interpreter) being executed (increased by 1 to skip the leading 0x7f) and an output length of "3". The perl script outputs "ELF" on my Linux box.

The Quiz, Question 2

I found out that the "yourtoy" file was a UPX - compressed file pretty fast. But trying to uncompress it with the upx utility didn't succeed as the file seemed to be corrupt.
I then tried upx'ing two other files, creating hexdumps of them and then doing a "diff3" on the hexdumps. I noticed that there were some areas where the other files matched but differed from "yourtoy" so I tried overwriting the corresponding areas in "yourtoy" with a hexeditor with the values found in the other files, but this did not work out.
After that i downloaded the source code for upx and ucl (the library upx uses) and used ddd to debug upx. I traced through several function calls until I found the one that finally returned the information "this is not a valid upx file". That function just searched the to-be-uncompressed file for some magic string, which it didn't find in "yourtoy". I then had a look at the other files I had created to find out that those contained the string twice whereas "yourtoy" only contained it once and instead of a second occurence contained another magic string of bovine origin. I replaced that with the correct string and was finally able to uncompress "yourtoy".

-- Lutz Böhne

I too had no problem finding the UPX header information in the packed binary. I tried to understand the UPX header format in order to be able to find bugs in the yourtoy compressed executable. After starring at it for a while and not knowing why the four bytes I thought were the version number were not at all what I expected, I tried to find the origin of the NotPackedException (btw. you only get it if you do a "upx -d yourtoy"). But after like five files of C++ code I can only barely read I gave up about this. I then upx'ed another binary and compared it to the provided one in order to find differences. But I only had a look at the top of the file b/c that's where I thought the header resided. Of course I had no luck with this either, so I jumped back into the source, finally finding a comment which explained the file layout. Now that I knew I had to look at the bottom, things were pretty straightforward. By changing only three bytes you could make the UPX file actually behave like it was supposed to...

-- Ernest Hammerschmidt