Tag: News

Profiler 2.5 is out with the following news:

– introduced scan provider extensions
– added support for Torrent files
– added the capability to display views as dialogs
– exposed official Python bindings for capstone
– added new controls to custom views
– updated capstone to 3.0.3
– fixed failed allocation security issue
– various bug fixes and improvements

Dialogs from views

In this new edition it’s possible to create dialogs out of views. Just like this:

ctx = proContext()
view = ctx.createView(ProView.Type_Custom, "Dialog title")
view.setup(view_layout, viewCallback, user_data)
dlg = ctx.createDialog(view)
dlg.show()

Of course, it doesn’t have to be a custom view, it can even be a simple text view or a hex view, although usually custom views make more sense for a dialog, as you’ll probably want to show some standard buttons like “Ok” and “Cancel” at the bottom.

Capstone bindings

While Capstone has been part of Profiler for quite some time now, now it’s possible to directly call its official Python bindings. The module can be found under ‘Pro.capstone’ and can be imported easily to be made working with existing code:

import Pro.capstone as capstone

Failed allocation security issue

In the Qt framework memory allocations fail silently, at least in the release version. We didn’t notice it, because in the debug version they would at least throw an exception preventing further execution. Since in release the execution wouldn’t be stopped, it was in some cases possible to trigger a failed allocation and then make the program use memory it didn’t own (so basically a buffer overflow). This problem has now been fixed.

Credit goes to the Insid3Code Team for having found and reported the issue.

Enjoy!

Profiler 2.3 is out with the following news:

– introduced YARA 3.2 support
– added groups for logic providers
– added Python action to encode/decode text
– added Python action to strip XML down to text
– added the possibility to choose the fixed font
– added color randomization for structs and intervals
– added close report and quit APIs
– exposed more methods of the Report class (including save)
– improved indentation handling in the script editor
– synchronized main and workspace output views
– improved output view
– updated libmagic to 5.21
– updated Capstone to 3.0
– many small improvements
– fixed libmagic on Linux
– removed the tray icon
– minor bug fixes

Logic provider groups

Logic providers can now be grouped in order to avoid clutter in the main window. Adding the following line to an existing logic provider will result in a new group being created:

group = Extra

Encode/decode text action

A handy Python action to convert from hex to text and vice-versa using all of Python’s supported encodings. Place yourself in a hex or text view and run the encoding/decoding action ‘Bytes to text’ or ‘Text to bytes’.

The operation will open a new text or hex view depending if it was an encoding or a decoding.

XML to text action

Strips tags from an XML and displays only the text. The action can be performed both on a hex and text view.

And it will open a new text view. This is useful to view the text of a DOCX or ODT document. In the future the preview for these documents will be made available automatically, but in the meantime this action is helpful.

Fixed font preferences

The fixed font used in most views can now be chosen from the ‘General’ settings.

Struct/intervals color randomization

When adding a structure or interval to the hex view the chosen color is now being randomized every time the dialog shows up. This behaviour can be disabled from the dialog itself and it’s also possible to randomize again the color by clicking on the specific refresh button.

Manually picking a different color for every interval is time consuming and so this feature should speed up raw data analysis.

Report APIs

Most of the report APIs have been exposed (check out the SDK documentation). This combined with the newly introduced ‘quit’ SDK method can be used to perform custom scans programmatically and save the resulting report.

Here’s a small example which can be launched from the command line:

from Pro.Core import *
import sys
 
ctx = proCoreContext()
 
def init():
    ctx.getSystem().addFile(sys.argv[1])
    return True
 
def rload():
    ctx.unregisterLogicProvider("test_logic")
    ctx.getReport().saveAs("auto.cpro")
    ctx.quit()
 
ctx.registerLogicProvider("test_logic", init, None, None, None, rload)
ctx.startScan("test_logic")

The command line syntax to run this script would be:

cerpro -r scan.py [file to scan]

The UI will show up and close automatically once the ‘quit’ method is called. Running this script in console mode using the ‘-c’ parameter is not yet possible, because of the differences in message handling on different platforms, but it will be in the future.

Synchronized output views

The output view of the main window and of the workspace are now synchronized, thus avoiding missing important log messages being printed in one or the other context.

Enjoy!

The new version 2.0 is out! The most important news is that we have a new online store, which allows orders from individuals and not only from organizations. If you’re not yet one of our customers, make sure to test out our trial. 🙂

We now offer 2 type of licenses Home/Academic and Commercial. Also, the price of the commercial license has been reduced. The reason for this is that we stripped active support from the license cost (we now offer support only in the advanced version). After 2 years on the road we had very few support requests and so it made sense to make licenses cheaper by removing the costs of support.

We’re currently finishing to port Profiler to Linux and OSX, so these platforms will be available soon. The current change-list reflects the changes in licensing and our cross-platform effort:

– switched to Visual Studio 2013
– updated Qt to 5.2.1
– updated Python to 3.4
– updated SQLite3
– updated OpenSSL
– switched from the XED2 to the Capstone disasm engine
– added disasm filters for ARM, Thumb, ARM64, MIPS, PowerPC and 8086
– implemented some custom view notifications in Python
– added UI controls to custom views
– made layouts available in the context of the main window
– improved Python SDK
– fixed many small issues

We switched to Qt 5, so PySide is unfortunately no longer supported. On the other hand the SDK now allows to build complex UIs. In fact, we fixed lots of minor issues in the SDK. The reason for that is that in the last months we had to offer a lot of SDK support and so we had to postpone many new features. The upside is that our SDK has become much more robust.

We also changed our licensing schema, which is no longer year-based, but version based. To compensate current customers for the lack of updates in the last months, we have renewed for free their license for the 2.x series. If you’re an active customer and you haven’t received your new license, please contact us!

This is mainly a bug fix version.

– added magic info action
– fixed crash when removing an embedded file currently open in a filters view
– fixed C++ ctor conflict which resulted in a crash when viewing Mach-O symbols (1.1 regression)
– small improvements

If you’re curious about the ctor conflict, I have written a small post explaining it.

And here it is.

– added libmagic to the SDK
– added preliminary ELF support
– added TIFF support
– added GZ, BZ2 and LZMA file support
– exposed internal API for files and paths to Python
– hooks are now triggered even when loading embedded objects in the workspace
– added magic info extension script
– exposed more DEX methods to Python
– remember manually enabled extensions
– capability to add individual files in the scan page
– some bug fixes

Enjoy.

The new 1.0 version of the Profiler is out with the following news:

– introduced logic provider extensions
– added SQLite3 support including free pages inspection
– exposed internal database access to extensions
– fixed some issues when executing Python code from other threads
– made actions available in the context of the main window

The 1.0 version represents for its round number and intrinsic meaning a milestone in the development road-map. So how does the actual development stage compare to the original road-map envisioned for 1.0?

Many features we’d like to have included are not there yet. On the other hand an even bigger number of features not originally considered for this version have been added, like complete support for C/C++ types, a JavaScript debugger, an incredibly powerful Python SDK, Lua filters etc.

Talking about file formats, few important ones are still missing. For instance ELF support is yet to be added. The reason for this lies behind the original idea to add support first for Windows file types. That’s why there’s support for esoteric file types like LNK and not for ELF. This strategy has been abandoned already some time ago and as you can see in 0.9.6 we added support for Mach-O executables. Also the overall support for Android (APKs, DEX, Binary XML) is very good and that only makes the support for ELF more important. Apart from that we’re happy with the number of formats currently supported and hope to significantly increase the number next year.

Another important aspect is documentation and tutorials. While we take good care of the blog, we’re certainly guilty in this regard. Unfortunately all time spent documenting is time subtracted from creating new features. We tried to give some practical examples this year (including reversing of malware):

• BlueBox Android Challenge
• CVE-2010-0188: PDF/Form/TIFF
• CVE-2012-0158: RTF/OLE/CFBF/PE
• Dissecting an ELF with C++ Types

But even there we certainly could do more. The already existing feature set of the standard version would already need half a book to be covered, not counting explanations regarding file formats. Sooner or later an entire book will become necessary, I guess. Early adopters have the advantage of gradually following the development and easily keeping up-to-date with new features. But the term ‘early adopter’ is relative. Become one of our customers today and you’ll become an ‘early adopter’ in a year! 😉

Sorry for the sales pitch, I was saying… Yes, our product offer has increased. Few months ago we have released PE Insider, a free Portable Executable viewer for the community, based on the same code base as Profiler.

Also, we have recently announced an advanced (forensic oriented) edition of Profiler. While this does subtract some time from the standard version, it also drives development a lot and the standard version will greatly benefit from it. For instance, the newly introduced logic providers could’ve been added later were it not for the advanced version. And the benefits won’t come only as extensions to the core and internal components, but also as additional file support as we’re going to show soon.

To mark the current milestone, starting from this version we’ll change the progression of versions. Every new release will increase the minor version (rather than the last number which will be reserved for bug fixes).

We hope you will accompany us in our journey towards 2.0!