CheckPlease - Payload-Agnostic Implant Security

CheckPlease -
Payload-Agnostic
Implant Security
@Arvanaghi & @ChrisTruncer

Brandon Arvanaghi
Associate Consultant at Mandiant
Red teaming, reverse engineering, tool development
Vanderbilt University 2

Chris Truncer
Previous Sys Admin turned Red Team
West Coast Red Team Lead
Open Source Developer
Veil, EyeWitness, WMImplant
3

Pop Quiz
Which is more effective at stopping malicious
applications from executing?
1) Application Whitelisting
2) Application Blacklisting
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@Arvanaghi
@ChrisTruncer

Pop Quiz
• Answer: Application Whitelisting!
• Rather than trying to figure out everything we don’t want to allow, we
identify what we do want
• Disallow all else!
• AppLocker on Windows 7, 8, 10
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@Arvanaghi
@ChrisTruncer

Sandbox Detection
• A sandbox is a virtual environment designed to
monitor malware behavior
• Dynamic analysis
• Malware acts benign if it thinks it is being dynamically
analyzed
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@Arvanaghi
@ChrisTruncer

Sandbox Detection
• Old thinking: sandboxes look a certain way, so let’s specifically check if we
are in a sandbox in our payloads
• Avoid running if it’s the case
• Registry keys and values, MAC addresses, limited RAM, etc.
• Can be useful!
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@Arvanaghi
@ChrisTruncer

Realization
• Trying to detect if you are in a sandbox is a form of
blacklisting!
• Identifying every kind of sandbox is too hard!
• Why do we write sandbox detection checks in the first place?
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@Arvanaghi
@ChrisTruncer

Realization
We want our malware to run where
we expect.
Avoiding sandboxes is a byproduct of that.
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@Arvanaghi
@ChrisTruncer

Workflow for Implant Security
1. Get initial access into domain
a. Limited information
2. Immediately exfiltrate domain data
a. We don’t dump creds initially, do we?
3. Never use a non-targeted payload again for that domain!
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@Arvanaghi
@ChrisTruncer

The Problems with Pure Sandbox Detection
1. You are not that smart.
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1. You are not that smart.
Hard enough debugging failed payloads.
AV? RAT? Whitelisting? Hard to say.
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2. Uptick in VM usage
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2. Uptick in VM usage
VMs used to be indicative of sandboxes
Today, they are critical assets.
We want to target them!
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3. Sandboxes look like legacy systems
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3. Sandboxes look like legacy systems
Legacy systems are easiest to target
Blacklisting sandboxes means
missing out!
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4. Anti-Anti-VM
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4. Anti-Anti-VM
How many more Anti-s do you want?
• Attackers strike
• Defenders detect
• Attackers mod
• Goto 1
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Creating a Payload-Agnostic Repository
• Implant security modules are exclusively written in C!
• Or discussed abstractly
• Payload deliverance growing in non-standard languages
• Let’s make a centralized library implementing these
techniques in all languages!
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@Arvanaghi
@ChrisTruncer

CheckPlease: Languages Supported
• C
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• C
• C#
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• C
• C#
• PowerShell
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• C
• C#
• PowerShell
• Python
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• C
• C#
• PowerShell
• Python
• Go
27

• C
• C#
• PowerShell
• Python
• Go
• Ruby
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• C
• C#
• PowerShell
• Python
• Go
• Ruby
• Perl
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Why don’t sandboxes follow all paths?
• Design decision for sandboxes
• Don’t have the computing power to follow all trees
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@Arvanaghi
@ChrisTruncer

Why don’t sandboxes follow all paths?
Example problem:
if ($env:username -eq “USERNAME THAT WOULD NEVER EXIST”) {
# Expand into several branches of nonsense
# Goal: waste the sandbox’s time and resources
# Sandbox rendered useless
}
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@Arvanaghi
@ChrisTruncer

Parent Process
• Every time we launch a payload, we know exactly
what the parent process should be!
• Word document?
• PDF document?
• HTA application?
• Most languages support finding the ppid
• Use that to find the string name of process
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@Arvanaghi
@ChrisTruncer

Payload Sleeping
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@Arvanaghi
@ChrisTruncer
• This is the first thing most people will try
• Making your code sleep an hour
• Should work right?
• Sandbox can’t keep resources running that long!
• Nope

Payload Sleeping
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@Arvanaghi
@ChrisTruncer
• Developers obviously know this too
• Look for sleep calls and hook them
• Fast-forward any sleep call
• Immediately jump to next part of the code
• So… how can this be beaten?

Payload Sleeping
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@Arvanaghi
@ChrisTruncer
• Outsource time requests to NTP servers!
• Request current time from NTP server
• Try to sleep for the requested amount of time
• Make another request for the current time from a
NTP server

Payload Sleeping
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@Arvanaghi
@ChrisTruncer
• Alternative option
• Can you develop a function which take an
approximate amount of time to compute?
• Iterate over that function as many times as you’d
like to sleep.
• RemoveS the network dependency for the
check

Encrypt with Targeted Indicators
• To protect our implant from running where we don’t
expect, we can encrypt it
• The key? An indicator from our targeted host
• MAC address
• Username + hostname
• Etc.
• Once again, sandbox is a BYPRODUCT!
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@Arvanaghi
@ChrisTruncer

• How does this work?
• Payload dynamically pulls system information
• System information is concatenated to generate
an encryption key
• If key is correct, decrypt data and run the real
code
• If not, assume on the wrong system and die
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@Arvanaghi
@ChrisTruncer

Ebowla is a great example of this in practice:
https://github.com/Genetic-Malware/Ebowla
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@Arvanaghi
@ChrisTruncer

Delay-Analysis Module
• In the hands of a skilled reverse engineer, nothing is infallible
• That’s not the goal, just beat initial automated analysis
• This can start at the source code level
• Used Hyperion?
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@Arvanaghi
@ChrisTruncer

• Hyperion receives your “file” and outputs a different encrypted file
• The output is encrypted with no key stored inside
• Due to an artificially constrained keyspace, it brute forces itself
• Let’s recreate this!
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@Arvanaghi
@ChrisTruncer

• The Delay-Analysis Python script receives an input file
• Your source code
• Select the language your code is in
• Output is encrypted code which brute forces itself at runtime
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@Arvanaghi
@ChrisTruncer

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Python: Delay Analysis
@Arvanaghi
@ChrisTruncer

Targeted Code
Host Metadata
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Process Names
• Easy to write code that enumerates running
processes
• Validate that no-blacklisted processes are running at
the same time
• Wireshark
• VMWare
• Process Explorer
• tshark
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@Arvanaghi
@ChrisTruncer

Process Names
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@Arvanaghi
@ChrisTruncer

Windows Updates
• The number of recent Windows updates can provide
information about the system
• How often it is patched
• Uptime
• Real users will likely update more than sandboxes
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@Arvanaghi
@ChrisTruncer

Windows Updates
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@Arvanaghi
@ChrisTruncer

Registry Size
• Do you know the approximate size of your system’s
registry?
• Fingerprint this information for an approximate size
within the targeted organization
• Validate it at runtime!
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@Arvanaghi
@ChrisTruncer

User Activity
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We all love users :)

User Interaction
• Reasons you want a user present
• Authed but don’t have user’s credentials
• Present a prompt to enter creds
• Watch them on VNC, see internal sites they navigate to
• Built-in cobalt strike
• Two-factor push notification
• Etc.
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@Arvanaghi
@ChrisTruncer

Mouse Clicks
• Check for user presence via mouse activity
• If the mouse is registering clicks, it’s indicative of user activity
• Require a minimum number of clicks prior to executing the
“protected code”
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@Arvanaghi
@ChrisTruncer

Python: Execute after “N” clicks Mouse Clicks
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@Arvanaghi
@ChrisTruncer

PowerShell: Execute after “N” clicks Mouse
Clicks
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@Arvanaghi
@ChrisTruncer

Mouse Position
• In addition to mouse clicks as one metric for user activity, track
mouse location
• Console can be broken down into (x,y) positions
• Perform a comparison of mouse location over a period of time
• 30 seconds?
• Should be near impossible to have the exact same location
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@Arvanaghi
@ChrisTruncer

Go: Check Mouse Position
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@Arvanaghi
@ChrisTruncer

Prompt Users!
• Users already get prompted for a variety of reasons, what’s one
more?
• They already just give us passwords, why not click a
button?
• Sole purpose is to require interactive use prior to code execution
• When run, the code will present the user with a pop-up, and will
wait to run
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@Arvanaghi
@ChrisTruncer

What else can we want to target?
• Number of USB drives mounted on the system
• Number of web browsers
• Minimum number of processes
• Whether certain files exist on disk
• Whether specific Registry keys/values exist (think installed programs, etc.)
• The number of processors on the system
• The minimum RAM size
• The minimum disk size
• The size of the Registry
• Whether a DLL is loaded
• Whether a process is running
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Only Running on Targeted System
if ((Get-WMIObject -Class Win32_ComputerSystem).Domain -eq
$expectedDomain) {
}
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$expectedDomain) {
if ($env:username -eq $expectedUsername) {
}
}
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$expectedDomain) {
if ($env:computername -eq $expectedHostname) {
}
}
}
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$expectedDomain) {
if ($env:computername -eq $expectedHostname) {
# Passed all checks, proceed!
}
}
}
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Veil
• This is a great opportunity to contribute to Veil’s codebase
• Add in a means to automatically develop targeted payloads
• Merge the code and quick demo
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THANKS!
Any questions?
https://github.com/Arvanaghi/CheckPlease
@Arvanaghi
@ChrisTruncer

CheckPlease - Payload-Agnostic Implant Security

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