DdiMon is a hypervisor performing inline hooking that is invisible to a guest (ie, any code other than DdiMon) by using extended page table (EPT).
DdiMon is meant to be an educational tool for understanding how to use EPT from a programming perspective for research. To demonstrate it, DdiMon installs the invisible inline hooks on the following device driver interfaces (DDIs) to monitor activities of the Windows built-in kernel patch protection, a.k.a. PatchGuard, and hide certain processes without being detected by PatchGuard.
- ExQueueWorkItem
- ExAllocatePoolWithTag
- ExFreePool
- ExFreePoolWithTag
- NtQuerySystemInformation
Those stealth shadow hooks are hidden from guest's read and write memory operations and exposed only on execution of the memory. Therefore, they are neither visible nor overwritable from a guest, while they function as ordinal hooks. It is accomplished by making use of EPT enforcing a guest to see different memory contents from what it would see if EPT is not in use. This technique is often called memory shadowing. For more details, see the Design section below.
Here is a movie demonstrating that shadow hooks allow you to monitor and control DDI calls without being notified by PatchGuard.
DdiMon is implemented on the top of HyperPlatform. See a project page for more details of HyperPlatform:
Clone full source code from Github with a below command and compile it on Visual Studio.
$ git clone --recursive https://github.com/tandasat/DdiMon.git
On the x64 platform, you have to enable test signing to install the driver. To do that, open the command prompt with the administrator privilege and type the following command, and then restart the system to activate the change:
>bcdedit /set testsigning on
To install and uninstall the driver, use the 'sc' command. For installation:
>sc create DdiMon type= kernel binPath= C:\Users\user\Desktop\DdiMon.sys
>sc start DdiMon
And for uninstallation:
>sc stop DdiMon
>sc delete DdiMon
>bcdedit /deletevalue testsigning
Note that the system must support the Intel VT-x and EPT technology to successfully install the driver.
To install the driver on a virtual machine on VMware Workstation, see an "Using VMware Workstation" section in the HyperPlatform User Document.
All logs are printed out to DbgView and saved in C:\Windows\DdiMon.log.
Despite existence of plenty of academic research projects[1,2,3] and production software[4,5], EPT (a.k.a. SLAT; second-level-address translation) is still underused technology among reverse engineers due to lack of information on how it works and how to control it through programming.
MoRE[6] by Jacob Torrey is a one of very few open source projects demonstrating use of EPT with small amount of code. While we recommend to look into the project for basic comprehension of how EPT can be initialized and used to set up more than 1:1 guest to machine physical memory mapping, MoRE lacks flexibility to extend its code for supporting broader platforms and implementing your own analysis tools.
DdiMon provides a similar sample use of EPT as what MoRE does with a greater range of platform support such as x64 and/or Windows 10. DdiMon, also, can be seen as example extension of HyperPlatform for memory virtualization.
- [1] SecVisor: A Tiny Hypervisor to Provide Lifetime Kernel Code Integrity for Commodity OSes - https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~arvinds/pubs/secvisor.pdf
- [2] SPIDER: Stealthy Binary Program Instrumentation and Debugging via Hardware Virtualization - https://www.cerias.purdue.edu/assets/pdf/bibtex_archive/2013-5.pdf
- [3] Dynamic VM Dependability Monitoring Using Hypervisor Probes - http://assured-cloud-computing.illinois.edu/files/2014/03/Dynamic-VM-Dependability-Monitoring-Using-Hypervisor-Probes.pdf
- [4] Windows 10 Virtualization-based Security (Device Guard) - https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt463091(v=vs.85).aspx
- [5] VMRay - https://www.vmray.com/features/
- [6] MoRE - https://github.com/ainfosec/MoRE
In order to install a shadow hook, DdiMon creates a couple of copies of a page where the address to install a hook belongs to. After DdiMon is initialized, those two pages are accessed when a guest, namely all but ones by the hypervisor (ie, DdiMon), attempts to access to the original page instead. For example, when DdiMon installs a hook onto 0x1234, two copied pages are created: 0xa000 for execution access and 0xb000 for read or write access, and memory access is performed as below after the hook is activated:
Requested Accessed
By Hypervisor: 0x1234 -> 0x1234 on all access
By Guest: 0x1234 -> 0xa234 on execution access
-> 0xb234 on read or write access
The following explains how it is accomplished.
Default state
DdiMon first configures an EPT entry corresponds to 0x1000-0x1fff to refer to the contents of 0xa000 and to disallow read and write access to the page.
Scenario: Read or Write
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With this configuration, any read and write access triggers EPT violation VM-exit. Up on the VM-exit, the EPT entry for 0x1000-0x1fff is modified to refer to the contents of 0xb000, which is copy of 0x1000, and to allow read and write to the page. And then, sets the Monitor Trap Flag (MTF), which works like the Trap Flag of the flag register but not visible to a guest, so that a guest can perform the read or write operation and then interrupted by the hypervisor with MTF VM-exit.
-
After executing a single instruction, a guest is interrupted by MTF VM-exit. On this VM-exit, the hypervisor clears the MTF and resets the EPT entry to the default state so that subsequent execution is done with the contents of 0xa000.
As a result of this sequence of operations, a guest executed a single instruction reading from or writing to 0xb234.
Scenario: Execute
At this time, execution is done against contents of 0xa000 without triggering any events unless no other settings is made. In order to monitor execution of 0xa234 (0x1234 from guest's perspective), DdiMon sets a break point (0xcc) to 0xa234 and handles #BP in the hypervisor. Following steps are how DdiMon hooks execution of 0xa234.
-
On #BP VM-exit, the hypervisor checks if guest's EIP/RIP is 0x1234 first. If so, the hypervisor changes the contents of the register to point to a corresponding hook handler for instrumenting the DDI call.
-
On VM-enter, a guest executes the hook handler. The hook handler calls an original function, examines parameters, return values and/or a return address, and takes action accordingly.
This is just like a typical inline hooking. Only differences are that it sets 0xcc and changes EIP/RIP from a hypervisor instead of overwriting original code with JMP instructions and that installed hooks are not visible from a guest. An advantage of using 0xcc is that it does not require a target function to have a length to install JMP instructions.
The following are a call hierarchy with regard to sequences explained above.
On DriverEntry
DdimonInitialization()
DdimonpEnumExportedSymbolsCallback() // Enumerates exports of ntoskrnl
ShInstallHook() // Installs a stealth hook
ShEnableHooks() // Activates installed hooks
ShEnablePageShadowing()
ShpEnablePageShadowingForExec() // Configures an EPT entry as
// explained in "Default state"
On EPT violation VM-exit with read or write
VmmpHandleEptViolation()
EptHandleEptViolation()
ShHandleEptViolation() // Performs actions as explained in the 1 of
// "Scenario: Read or Write"
On MTF VM-exit
VmmpHandleMonitorTrap()
ShHandleMonitorTrapFlag() // Performs actions as explained in the 2 of
// "Scenario: Read or Write"
On #BP VM-exit
VmmpHandleException()
ShHandleBreakpoint() // Performs actions as explained in the 1 of
// "Scenario: Execute"
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ExQueueWorkItem - The hook handler prints out given parameters when a specified work item routine is not inside any images.
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ExAllocatePoolWithTag - The hook handler prints out given parameters and a return value of ExAllocatePoolWithTag() when it is called from an address where is not backed by any images.
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ExFreePool and ExFreePoolWithTag - The hook handlers print out given parameters when they are called from addresses where are not backed by any images.
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NtQuerySystemInformation - The hook handler takes out an entry for "cmd.exe" from returned process information so that cmd.exe is not listed by process enumeration.
The easiest way to see those logs is installing NoImage.sys.
Logs for activities of NoImage are look like this:
17:59:23.014 INF #0 4 48 System 84660265: ExFreePoolWithTag(P= 84665000, Tag= nigm)
17:59:23.014 INF #0 4 48 System 84660283: ExAllocatePoolWithTag(POOL_TYPE= 00000000, NumberOfBytes= 00001000, Tag= nigm) => 8517B000
17:59:23.014 INF #0 4 48 System 8517B1C3: ExQueueWorkItem({Routine= 8517B1D4, Parameter= 8517B000}, 1)
DdiMon is meant to be an educational tool and not robust, production quality software which is able to handle various edge cases. For example, DdiMon does not handle self-modification code since any memory writes on a shadowed page is not reflected to a view for execution. For this reason, researchers are encouraged to use this project as sample code to get familiar with EPT and develop their own tools as needed.
- x86 and x64 Windows 7, 8.1 and 10
- The system must support the Intel VT-x and EPT technology
This software is released under the MIT License, see LICENSE.