Tag: News

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!

The new 0.9.9 version of the Profiler is out with the following news:

– added support for docked views in the main window
– added scanning and rload (report load) hook notifications
– partially exposed custom views to Python
– exposed addEmbeddedObject method to Python
– exposed NTContainer find methods to Python
– improved importing of anonymous records (C11)
– added recognition of volatile keyword in types
– moved the message box constants to the Pro.Core module
– added tools view
– added quoted-printable decoding filter
– added format quota calculator extension
– added experimental EML attachment detection extension

Improved importing of anonymous records

C11 supports anonymous records like the following:

struct test {
    union {
        struct {
            unsigned int a;
            unsigned int b;
        };
        struct {
            unsigned int c;
            unsigned int d;
        };
        struct {
            unsigned int e;
            unsigned int f;
        };
    };
};

Notice that not only is the union anonymous but even its substructures are. The Header Manager is now capable of correctly importing this code. As usual anonymous types will be renamed (both their type and name).

Since 0.9.7 has been a massive release with lots of changes, we dedicated the new 0.9.8 version of the Profiler to improve things and fix minor bugs. Here’s the change list:

– improved support for Windows 8.1 PEs
– added language options to Header Manager
– improved anonymous types renaming logic
– improved TrueType font disassembler
– many small improvements
– fixed some minor bugs

Since some improvements are PE related, PE Insider has been updated as well.

Enjoy!

The new 0.9.7 version of the Profiler is out with the following news:

– introduced C++ class/struct parsing with Clang
– introduced headers, layouts and manual analysis in hex mode
– exposed all the above to the Python SDK
– added capability to turn into a portable application
– added SHA-3 hashes
– updated Qt to 4.8.5
– updated OpenSSL
– behavior change: displaying table flags now requires a double click

Enjoy!

The new 0.9.6 version of the Profiler is out. The main new feature is the support for Mach-O files. Since this feature stands on its own, it did make sense to postpone other features to the next version and in the meanwhile let our users benefit from this addition.

Here’s the changelist:

– added support for Mach-O files
– added support for fat/universal binaries
– added support for Apple code signatures
– exposed DemangleSymbolName to Python

The DemangleSymbolName function demangles both VC++ and GCC symbols. Its use is straightforward:

from Pro.Core import DemangleSymbolName
demangled = DemangleSymbolName("__ZNK8OSObject14getRetainCountEv")
print(demangled)
# outputs: OSObject::getRetainCount() const

We’re happy to present to you the new version of the Profiler with the following news:

– introduced Lua filters: lua/custom and lua/loop
– added optional condition to misc/basic
– added JavaScript execute action
– added JavaScript debugger
– simplified save report/project logic
– included actions among the extensions views
– improved detection of shellcodes
– introduced max file size option for shellcode detection
– improved OLE Streams parsing and extraction from RTFs
– exposed getHash method in ScanProvider to Python
– added text replace functionality to text controls

While most of the items in the list have been discussed in previous posts, some of them need a brief introduction.

Max file size for shellcode detection

While shellcode detection applies by default to files of any size, you might want to specify a threshold.

This is useful if you want to speed up the analysis of large files. It might come handy in some cases.

The ‘getHash’ method

This method should be used by hooks to retrieve a hash for the currently scanned file. The syntax is very simple:

sp.getHash("md5")

Of course one could use a filter to hash the file, but the advantage of this method is that once a particular hash type has been computed it won’t be computed again if requested by another hook.

Improved OLE Streams parsing and extraction from RTFs

In one of the previous use cases we’ve analyzed a huge set of malicious RTF documents. Some of them were not recognized correctly and some of them showed problems in the automatic extraction of OLE streams. This release fixes these issues.

As you can see all RTFs are now correctly parsed and their OLE stream has been extracted. Some of the OLE objects though are not extracted correctly. After looking into it, it seems to be a problem with the malicious files themselves. OLE streams are encoded as hex strings into the RTF and in some of these files there’s an extra byte which invalidates the sequence.

01 05 00 00 02 00 00 00 1B 00 00 00 A 4D

That ‘A’ character between 00 and 4D makes the sequence to be 00 A4 D which is incorrect. Our guess is that the malware generator which produced these RTFs outputted some invalid ones by inserting an ‘A’ character instead of a 0x0A newline.

While RTF readers are not able to parse these objects either it’s still interesting for our analysis to be able to inspect them. So we just load the RTF files patching the ‘A’ character with a filter as in the screenshot below.

That fixes it and we are now able to inspect the embedded OLE object and its threats. As you can see we get directly the shellcode disassembly from the automatic analysis.

Enjoy!

The new version is out with the following news:

– added RTF support including OLE extraction and raw text preview
– added file times support and extraction in Zip archives
– added disasm options to several engines
– added support for Android Binary XML format
– exposed several disasm engines as filters
– introduced metadata strings to SDK
– exposed Zip format class to Python
– fixed module initialization problem in the SDK

Some features planned for this release were postponed for the next version (or perhaps even the version after that), because too many unplanned new features have been introduced in 0.9.4. Some of the news above need further explanations and examples, but I’m afraid posts about them will have to wait. It would be nice to show some of these new features in conjunction with other features which are planned for the near future.

In the meantime we hope you enjoy the release!

The new version is out with the following news:

– subdivided the Python SDK into modules
– exposed many core and file format classes to Python (part 2)
– exposed filters to Python
– introduced Python hooks
– introduced Python key providers
– improved SDK documentation
– added extensions view
– added file formats scan option
– added decryption keys view
– fixed occasional concurrency issue with large files
– fixed embedded files manual addition issue (affected versions: >= 0.9.1)

Most of the items in the list have been demonstrated in previous posts. The only addition left to discuss is the key dialog. When a file is encrypted and gets decrypted with a key either provided by the user or by a script, then this key ends up in a special list of matched keys. This list can now be inspected by the user.

If some files have been decrypted an additional “Decryption keys” button will be shown. Just click on it and you’ll get the list of matched keys.

That’s all. Enjoy!

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

– removed virtual memory constraint: large files are now supported
– added decompression bomb detection
– added media preview for image files
– added preview for several PE resources
– added text preview for Office Word Documents
– added format selection to open file dialog
– display format choose dialog when more than one format has been detected
– added XFA interactive forms detection inside PDFs
– added from/to hex and base64 filters
– automatically detect files in Zip archives missing a Central Directory
– increased PySide integration
– fixed Office VBA extraction bug
– fixed bug in PDF V4 and V5 Revision encryption

Format detection & selection

To better help with the identification of files which can be interpreted as different formats, the individual file dialog features now some additions.

As you can see the identified formats for the currently selected file are listed (it’s a simple GIF file with a PDF appended at the end). The dialog gives the user also the ability to manually choose the format to use for loading the file. While all this could be achieved even before, it wasn’t as handy as it is now.

However, it wouldn’t make sense to display the file selection dialog when the user uses the shell integration or drops a file to open it. So, instead the Profiler displays a choice dialog for the format in case multiple formats are detected.

Conversion filters

Some new filters are available: from/to hex/base64.

While the actions in the Profiler already feautured a mechanism to do these conversions, having them as filters is extremely useful, because it allows to use them to load embedded files or to convert large portions of data.

Damaged Zip archives

While it has always been possible to manually extract through filters data or partial data from damaged Zip files (e.g. those missing a Central Directory), now the embedded data is automatically analyzed and ready for inspection. This means that even when a Zip archive is truncated and some compressed files are truncated as well, they will nonetheless be automatically detected and be available for inspection by the user.

As you can see many improvements have been introduced. The most important of them is of course the removal of the virtual memory constraints as it represents an important step in the roadmap of the Profiler. Stay tuned as the next version will be important as well!

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

– added capability of opening multiple analysis views
– added capability of switching root object in the workspace
– added navigation in analysis views
– added bookmarks
– added PySide integration
– added user application data folder support
– added history for the Python command line and script dialog
– added save option to the keys input dialog
– improved notes: the toolbar now signals their presence
– updated Qt to 4.8.4

Also a new Demo version has been released, which as usual can be found on the product page.