After a lot of work, I'm happy to announce that Vera 0.20 is available for download. This release is a rewrite of the entire code base into wxWidgets. Based on some excellent feedback from my talk at REcon (an excellent con by the way) I've made some substantial changes to the backend code.

If you're not familiar with VERA, it's a visualization tool to help understand the dynamic execution of a program. It's made to take the instruction traces from Ether and generate directed graphs showing the overall flow and composition of a program. Identifying the OEP is easy, as well as looking for main loops and initialization sections of the program. You can read about VERA in my Vizsec 2009 paper for more information.

Here's the complete changelog:

Rewrite of entire codebase to wxWidgets (should allow for future ports to other platforms)
Added configuration file (~/.wxVera/wxvera.ini)
Read/save previous window position and size from/to config file
Fixed a graph centering problem
Added update checking code
Reloading of graphs more efficient
Added welcome message
Introduced notebook style for GUI

Please feel free to contact me (dquist at this domain) if you have any problems or suggestions for VERA. Thanks!

There were good responses, mostly from people in the AV industry, to my blog post about the malware testing standards. Overlooking my error linking to their original paper (sorry) there were some points I would like to address.

At the heart of this whole process, is exactly how dangerous a collection of malware is. For the consumers, I would argue, it's not dangerous at all. The malware industry is the only one who has to fear from it. Notice I didn't say just the AV vendors, but also the producers of the malicious software. In large part the authors depend on a closed, inside group of people unwilling to collaborate openly on the problem. If you look at the major sources of malware in academic research prior to the creation of large open collections, you'll see that there were some big problems. First, the samples were old and not representative of current threats. Second, those samples either did not work or were not malicious in nature. Finally, the samples are traded as something of value.

I'm no different, of course. I derive value both from the collection and from consulting. I do, however, go out of my way to support those doing open research as much as I can. If someone in academia needs access to samples, just contact me and I'll work something out. Likewise we have helped innumerable small businesses get their start in the malware world before they could enter the "circle of trust" mentioned by David Harley.

The "circle of trust" is often cited when discussing who can and cannot gain access to these samples. Over the course of the years I've joined four of these groups. While the vetting is done as best as possible, there's very little outside of an email address, and a recommendation keeping someone from joining. Antivirus vendors exchange malware with themselves at a much higher volume, but there is still a perceived difficulty of entering this area. Malware exists on the Internet in a freely available manner as a function of its being. Limiting sample access to a certain set of privileged people fundamentally hurts innovation and response by everyone.

There was also some allusion that I did not support malware testing at all. That is not the case. Malware defense systems should be heavily tested against a range of threats. The basis for my problems with the AMTSO is that it should *not* be composed of anyone in the AV industry. Consumer Reports did an excellent job exposing the ineffectiveness of AV vendors by producing new samples. Due to the very nature of the threat, there are going to be new samples that are discovered for the first time. If an AV software can't respond to this threat, it should not be given a favorable review.

The current set of players in the malware testing arena are profit driven. In and of itself that's ok, I'm all for capitalism, but in fairness there needs to be an independent authority. AV testing companies that publish open information on the effectiveness of scanning results are not independent. Without naming names, there is a prominent one claiming to provide results for the public, but instead is backed by every AV vendor in the industry. This testing company takes in new samples, scans them with all the products, then tells the vendors how their performance rates. What is not acceptable, in my view, are the shoddily written reports intended for consumers that report unethically high detection rates.

Finally I would like to address the ethics of the malware tester. One thing I agree with David Harley on is the need to represent the full scope of the testing process to the consumer. One of the things that the academic world does well is to produce research which can be recreated by other researchers. That's the intent, at least. AV testing standards advocated by the vendors cannot and will not provide the latest samples to malware authors. What this ends up doing is providing all the methods of testing, but not the actual data to test on. For those of us able to use new samples, it's not a problem. Others who have older data and are unable to acquire new malware (due to cost, time involved, etc.) are left with only one viable option: Synthesize new samples using the exact same methods available to the authors.

First of all, thanks for all the great feedback from everyone about Vera. Keep the feedback coming!

Vera 0.11 is out on the main Vera page. This release fixes a major memory leak for those of you who aren't running video cards with a gig of ram. This should also alleviate problems that were related to running under Windows XP. A future port to a wxWidgets version is underway. This will eventually allow for cross-platform versions, hopefully timed with the IDA QT release.

As always, please report bugs to dquist at this domain.

To make Ether a bit easier to install, we've put together a Debian package with precompiled Ether binaries. This is considered a highly beta install package, so you will want to take care about where you install it. Everything should install into /opt/ and work very closely to how Ether does when you compile via source.

Please note that this package contains the Ether patched Xen package. Other than satisfying the package's dependencies, you shouldn't install anything beyond that. This has been tested with a fresh installation of Debian Lenny. Please note that uninstall is currently not implemented.

Thanks to Chris Collord and Daniel Cox for their work on this.

Download the Ether 0.1 Debian Package here

I've had a few people email me about how to use non-Ether generated trace files in VERA. To help with this, I ran a trace with Ether of the Notepad.exe included with Windows XP.

Notepad.exe Trace file

If you want to generate instruction traces external from Ether, you just need to make sure it follows the same format. First, you should start with the standard instruction trace boilerplate. It looks like this:

After init:
        shared_page_ptr: 0xffff830000fd9000
        shared_page_mfn: 0xfd9
        domid_source: 0
        event_channel_port: 34
Shared Page va: 0x7fde19b77000
Shared Page test:
        Page-Sharing is A-OK!

Trying to bind to local port...
Success, bound to local port: 35
Trying to get first pending notification...
Taking off suprious pending notification...
Setting filter by name to: notepad.exe
Execution of Target detected:
        Image Base:  0x1000000
        Image Size:  0x14000
        Entry Point: 0x100739d

After this, all you need to do is have a listing of instructions. Right now the only thing I'm parsing is the instruction address, so there's no need to include the actual instruction. Later versions of VERA will use the disassembly.

100739d: push   0x70
100739d: push   0x70
100739f: push   0x01001898
10073a4: call   0x01007568
1007568: push   0x010075BA
100756d: mov    eax, fs:[0x00000000]
1007573: push   eax

At the end of the file, after all the instructions make sure you include two "Handling sigint" messages:

1007519: jnz    0x01007522
100751b: push   esi
100751c: call   [0x1001318]
Handling sigint
Handling sigint

That should be all you need to use VERA for your own uses. As always, let me know if there are any bugs you observe.

I would like to announce the latest version of VERA, the reverse engineering visualization program. Lots of bugs have been fixed, which I have detailed below. Be sure to read the original VERA release documentation for instructions on how to use it.

Here is the change log:

• View panning has now been fixed so that it follows the mouse.

• Cleaned up display code and made it more portable
• Fixed right-click selection code. Currently a stub function but more will come later
• Center graph on first load. Now the graph isn't out in the middle of nowhere when you first load it.
• The start of execution is highlighted with a big blue box
• Added arrows to show directionality of execution
• Implemented frustum culling for rendering font text. This makes things *much* faster.

If you have any problems, please let me know via dquist SHIFT-2 offensivecomputingDOTnet

Writing or presenting about AV testing and performance is a great way to draw the collective ire of the AV industry. This is a hot button subject that I, personally, have received a lot of grief on. The primary reason that the AV industry is so sensitive about their software is because it is not as effective as they would like you to believe. Case in point is the recent Anti-Malware Testing Standards Organization’s document titled Issues involved in the ‘creation’ of samples for testing. If you want to find a document listing all the hot-button issues that particularly perturb the AV community, here it is.

Without taking a particular side, the document seeks to “frame the debate” of the issue of “creating” malware samples. What follows is a 19 page exploration of all the ways new malware can be created. Here is a short list of modifications that they address:

1. Archiving samples using ZIP or tar

2. Packing / repacking with a new packer (think UPX or ASPack)
3. Using a malware generation kit
4. Server-side polymorphic samples - the sample is slightly modified every time it is downloaded from a public website
5. Patched versions of an existing file, including PE modifications and actual code changes
6. Writing a custom packer
7. Writing a new sample using existing techniques
8. Writing new samples using unknown techniques

Specifically prohibited is public dissemination of malware samples. These might actually encourage people to test AV software before buying it.

The pros and cons of each are presented, followed by a way to frame your debate afterwards. What all of these miss is the central point that malware authors are using every single one of these techniques with spectacular success. The other terrible secret is that these techniques are extremely easy. Continued debate on whether or not these tests are ethical is moot because malware authors are already using them. In order to protect against real threats, you must use the techniques that are being used to evade your protection software.

Consider the NHTSA talking about testing crash performance, but not actually ever smashing any of the cars into a wall. There’s no substitute for the real thing unless you’re trying to hide something. In the case of the AV industry, that thing is their technological irrelevance to the modern malware threat.

Today I was at Best Buy playing with the iPad, when I tried loading Offensive Computing on the web browser. It seems that Best Buy thinks that this site has something to do with hacking. I wonder if some customers were stress testing the demo machines' antivirus products.

The picture is blurry so here is the text:

This Page Cannot Be Displayed

Based on your corporate access policies, access to this web site ( http://offensivecomputing.net/ ) 
has been blocked because the web category "Hacking" is not allowed.

Store Network

If you have questions, please contact a Best Buy Employee and provide the codes shown below.

Notification codes:     (1, WEBCAT, BLOCK-WEBCAT, 0x0021ed3a, 1270677200.557, 
AAAdUAAAAAAAAAAAyf8AEP8AAAA=, http://offensivecomputing.net/)

Vizsec 2010, or the Visualization Security conference, is one of those conferences that I feel strongly could change the nature of security field. If you have any ideas for visualization, especially reverse engineering related visualization, I strongly recommend you submit a paper there. Here are the relevant dates:

April 30, 2010 Full papers
May 21, 2010 Short papers

The Vizsec CFP is open now. It's colocated with RAID this year. Based on the 2008 RAID papers it should be a productive week.

One of the day-to-day tasks of running this site involves monitoring for spam. Usually it's no problem: I just delete the junk posts, comments, and disable the accounts. I've made some tools to make this pretty easy. The problem is that the spammers and malcontents seem to have ratcheted up their spamming and it's getting to be too much work. I've made a drastic change requiring people to send me an email asking to register their account.

There is a general pattern to the spam. All of the accounts are new and created within 1-10 hours of the spam. They all tend to have Gmail accounts. Others such as Yahoo, Hotmail, etc. have really dropped off. It would be nice if Google could do something to prevent people from taking advantage of their server. If I just banned any accounts from Gmail I could probably get rid of about 90% of the spam. That would affect other people using Gmail legitimately though, so I didn't want to take that step.

I realize there are people out there doing legitimate work [1] that can't answer the questions truthfully. That's ok, just make something up. I will accept "I work for the Post Office" as an answer [2], or pretty much anything else. So far it seems to be working too, there haven't been nearly as many spam messages as before.

There also have been some efforts to download our entire collection of malware. While I can understand why someone would want to do this, it does end up using a lot of our resources, bandwidth being one of them. As always I'm happy to work with people but please contact me about it. I'm happy to make trades with people for new samples I can add. If you have nothing to trade drop me a note and we can work something out.

[1] For some definition of legitimate. :)
[2] Stolen without shame from Halvar's class