Comprehensive Shellcode Detection using Runtime Heuristics

Michalis Polychronakis Kostas G. Anagnostakis Evangelos P. Markatos Columbia University, USA Niometrics, Singapore FORTH-ICS, Greece [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]

ABSTRACT The injected code, known as shellcode, carries out the first stage of A promising method for the detection of previously unknown code the attack, which usually involves the download and execution of a injection attacks is the identification of the shellcode that is part of malware binary on the compromised host. the attack vector using payload execution. Existing systems based Once sophisticated tricks of the most skilled virus authors, ad- on this approach rely on the self-decrypting behavior of polymor- vanced evasion techniques like code obfuscation and polymorphism phic code and can identify only that particular class of shellcode. are now the norm in most instances of malicious code [19]. The Plain, and more importantly, metamorphic shellcode do not carry wide availability of ready-to-use shellcode construction and obfus- a decryption routine nor exhibit any self-modifications and thus cation toolkits and the discovery rate of new vulnerabilities have both evade existing detection systems. In this paper, we present rendered exploit or vulnerability specific detection techniques in- a comprehensive shellcode detection technique that uses a set of effective [31]. A promising approach for the generic detection of runtime heuristics to identify the presence of shellcode in arbitrary code injection attacks is to focus on the identification of the shell- data streams. We have identified fundamental machine-level oper- code that is indispensably part of the attack vector, a technique ini- ations that are inescapably performed by different shellcode types, tially known as abstract payload execution [33]. Identifying the based on which we have designed heuristics that enable the detec- presence of the shellcode itself allows for the detection of previ- tion of plain and metamorphic shellcode regardless of the use of ously unknown attacks without caring about the particular exploita- self-decryption. We have implemented our technique in Gene, a tion method used or the vulnerability being exploited. code injection attack detection system based on passive network Initial implementations of this approach attempt to identify the monitoring. Our experimental evaluation and real-world deploy- presence of shellcode in network inputs using static code analy- ment show that Gene can effectively detect a large and diverse set sis [33–35]. However, methods based on static analysis cannot ef- of shellcode samples that are currently missed by existing detec- fectively handle malicious code that employs advanced obfuscation tors, while so far it has not generated any false positives. tricks such as indirect jumps and self-modifications. Dynamic code analysis using emulation is not hindered by such obfuscations and can detect even extensively obfuscated shellcode. This kind of “ac- Categories and Subject Descriptors tual” payload execution has proved quite effective in practice [22] K.6.5 [Security and Protection]: Invasive software and is being used in network-level and host-level systems for the zero-day detection of both server-side and client-side code injec- General Terms tion attacks [9, 14, 15, 23, 38]. A limitation of the above techniques is that they are confined to Security the detection of a particular class of polymorphic shellcode that ex- hibits self-decrypting behavior. Although shellcode “packing” and Keywords encryption are commonly used for evading signature-based detec- tors, attackers can achieve the same or even higher level of eva- Shellcode Detection, Payload Execution, Code Emulation siveness without the use of self-decrypting code, rendering above systems ineffective. Besides code encryption, polymorphism can 1. INTRODUCTION instead be achieved by mutating the actual instructions of the shell- Code injection attacks have become one of the primary meth- code before launching the attack—a technique known as metamor- ods of malware spreading. In a typical code injection attack, the phism [32]. Metamorphism has been widely used by virus authors attacker sends a malicious input that exploits a memory corrup- and thus can trivially be applied for shellcode mutation. Surpris- tion vulnerability in a program running on the victim’s computer. ingly, even plain shellcode, i.e., shellcode that does not change across different instances, is also not detected by existing payload execution methods. Technically, a plain shellcode is no different than any instance of metamorphic shellcode, since both do not carry Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for a decryption routine nor exhibit any self-modifications or dynamic personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are code generation. Consequently, an attack that uses a previously not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies unknown static analysis-resistant plain shellcode will manage to bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to evade existing detection systems. republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. In this paper, we present a comprehensive shellcode detection ACSAC ’10 Dec. 6-10, 2010, Austin, Texas USA technique based on payload execution. In contrast to previous ap- Copyright 2010 ACM 978-1-4503-0133-6/10/12 ...$10.00. Abbreviation Matching Shellcode Behavior PEB kernel32.dll base address resolution BACKWD kernel32.dll base address resolution SEH Memory scanning / SEH-based GetPC code SYSCALL Memory scanning

Table 1: Overview of the shellcode detection heuristics used in Gene.

heuristics can easily be added due to the extensible nature of the system. Figure 1: Overview of the proposed shellcode detection archi- Existing polymorphic shellcode detection methods focus on the tecture. identification of self-decrypting behavior, which can be simulated without any host-level information [23]. For example, accesses to proaches that use a single detection algorithm for a particular class addresses other than the memory area of the shellcode itself are of shellcode, our method relies on several runtime heuristics tai- ignored. However, shellcode is meant to be injected into a running lored to the identification of different shellcode types. We have process and it usually accesses certain parts of the process’ address designed four heuristics for the detection of plain and metamorphic space, e.g., for retrieving and calling API functions. In contrast to shellcode targeting Windows systems. Polymorphic shellcode is in previous approaches, the emulator used in our system is equipped essence a self-decrypting version of a plain shellcode, and thus it with a fully blown virtual memory subsystem that handles all user- is also effectively detected, since the concealed plain shellcode is level memory accesses and enables the initialization of memory revealed during execution. In fact, we also enable the detection of pages with arbitrary content. This allows us to populate the virtual polymorphic shellcode that uses SEH-based GetPC code, which is address space of the supposed process with an image of the mapped currently not handled by existing polymorphic shellcode detectors. pages of a process taken from a real system. Furthermore, instead of solely using a CPU emulator, our approach The purpose of this functionality is twofold: First, it enables couples the heuristics with an appropriate image of the complete the construction of heuristics that check for memory accesses to address space of a real process, enabling the correct execution of process-specific data structures. Although the heuristics presented shellcode that depends on certain kinds of host-level context. in this paper target Windows shellcode, and thus the address space We have implemented the above technique in Gene, a network- image used in conjunction with these heuristics is taken from a level detector that scans all client-initiated streams for code injec- Windows process, some other heuristic can use a different mem- tion attacks against network services. Gene is based on passive ory image, e.g., taken from a Linux process. Second, this allows to network monitoring, which offers the benefits of easy large-scale some extent the correct execution of non-self-contained shellcode deployment and protection of multiple hosts using a single sen- that may perform accesses to known memory locations for evasion sor, while it allows us to test the effectiveness of our technique purposes [10]. We discuss this issue further in Sec. 6. in real-world environments. Nevertheless, although Gene operates at the network level, its core inspection engine can analyze arbi- 3. RUNTIME HEURISTICS trary data coming from any source. This allows our approach to be Each heuristic used in Gene is composed of a sequence of con- readily embedded in existing systems that employ emulation-based ditions that should all be satisfied in order during the execution of detection in other domains, e.g., for the detection of malicious web- malicious code. Table 1 gives an overview of the four heuristics sites [15] or in browser add-ons for the detection of drive-by down- presented in this section. The heuristics focus on the identification load attacks [14]. of the first actions of different shellcode types, according to their Our evaluation with publicly available shellcode samples and functionality, regardless of any self-decrypting behavior. shellcode construction toolkits, shows that Gene can effectively de- tect many different shellcode instances without prior knowledge 3.1 Resolving kernel32.dll about each particular implementation. At the same time, after ex- The typical end goal of the shellcode is to give the attacker full tensive testing of the runtime heuristics using a large and diverse set control of the victim system. This usually involves just a few sim- of generated and real data, in addition to a five-month deployment ple operations, such as downloading and executing a malware bi- in production networks, Gene has not generated any false positives. nary on the compromised host. These operations require interac- tion with the OS through the system call interface, or in case of 2. ARCHITECTURE Microsoft Windows, through the user-level Windows API. The proposed shellcode detection system is built around a CPU The Windows API is divided into several dynamic load libraries emulator that executes valid instruction sequences found in the in- (DLLs). In order to call an API function, the shellcode must first spected input. An overview of our approach is illustrated in Fig. 1. find its absolute address in the address space of the process. This Each input is mapped to an arbitrary location in the virtual address can be achieved in a reliable way by searching for the Relative Vir- space of a supposed process, and a new execution begins from each tual Addresses (RVAs) of the function in the Export Directory Table and every byte of the input, since the position of the first instruc- (EDT) of the DLL. The absolute Virtual Memory Address (VMA) tion of the shellcode is unknown and can be easily obfuscated. The of the function can then be easily computed by adding the DLL’s detection engine is based on multiple heuristics that match runtime base address to the function’s RVA. In fact, kernel32.dll pro- patterns inherent in different types of shellcode. During execution, vides the quite convenient functions LoadLibrary, which loads the system checks several conditions that should all be satisfied the specified DLL into the address space of the calling process and in order for a heuristic to match some shellcode. Moreover, new returns its base address, and GetProcAddress, which returns 1 xoreax,eax ;eax=0 2 mov eax, fs:[eax+0x30] ; eax = PEB The linear address of the TIB is also contained in the TIB itself 3 mov eax, [eax+0x0C] ; eax = PEB.LoaderData at the location FS:[0x18], as shown in Fig. 3. Thus, another way 4 mov esi, [eax+0x1C] ; esi = InInitializationOrder of reading the pointer to the PEB without using the FS register in ModuleList.Flink 5 lodsd ;eax=2ndlistentry the same instruction is the following: (kernel32.dll) xoreax,eax ;eax=0 6 mov eax, [eax+0x08] ; eax = LDR_MODULE.BaseAddress xor eax,fs:[eax+0x18] ; eax = TIB address mov eax,[eax+0x30] ; eax = PEB address Figure 2: A typical example of code that resolves the base ad- dress of kernel32.dll through the PEB. Note in the above example that other instructions besides mov can be used to indirectly read a memory address through the FS regis- ter (xor in this case). No matter how obfuscated the code is, the the address of an exported function from the specified DLL. Af- condition remains robust since it does not rely on the execution of ter resolving these two functions, any other function in any DLL particular instructions. can be loaded and used directly. However, custom function search- Although condition P1 is quite restrictive, the possibility of en- ing using hashes is usually preferable in modern shellcode, since countering a random read from FS:[0x30] during the execu- GetProcAddress takes as argument the actual name of the func- tion of some benign input is not negligible. Thus, it is desirable tion to be resolved, which increases the shellcode size considerably. to strengthen the heuristic with more operations exhibited by any No matter which method is used, a common fundamental oper- PEB-based kernel32.dll resolution code. ation in all above cases is that the shellcode has to first locate the base address of kernel32.dll. Since this is an inherent opera- Condition P2. Having a pointer to the PEB, the next step of the tion that must be performed by any Windows shellcode that needs shellcode is to obtain a pointer to the PEB_LDR_DATA structure to call a Windows API function, it is a perfect candidate for the that holds the list of loaded modules (line 3 in Fig. 2). Such a development of a generic shellcode detection heuristic. pointer exists 0xC bytes into the PEB, in the LoaderData field. Since this is the only available reference to that data structure, the 3.1.1 Process Environment Block shellcode unavoidably has to read the PEB.LoaderData pointer. Probably the most reliable and widely used technique for deter- We can use this constraint as a second condition for the PEB heuris- mining the base address of kernel32.dll takes advantage of tic (P2): the linear address of PEB.LoaderData is read. the Process Environment Block (PEB), a user-level structure that Condition P3. Moving on, the shellcode has to walk through the holds extensive process-specific information. Figure 2 shows a typ- loaded modules list and locate the second entry (kernel32.dll). ical example of PEB-based code for resolving kernel32.dll. A pointer to the first entry of the list exists in the InInitializa- The shellcode first gets a pointer to the PEB (line 2) through the tionOrderModuleList.Flink field located 0x1C bytes into Thread Information Block (TIB), which is always accessible at a the PEB_LDR_DATA structure. The read operation from this mem- zero offset from the segment specified by the FS register. A pointer ory location (line 4 in Fig. 2) allows for strengthening further the to the PEB exists 0x30 bytes into the TIB, as shown in Fig. 3. The detection heuristic with a third condition. absolute memory address of the TIB and the PEB varies among Although this is the most well known [5,26,27], and widely used processes, and thus the only reliable way to get a handle to the PEB technique for all Windows versions up to Windows Vista, it does is through the FS register, and specifically, by reading the pointer not work “as-is” for Windows 7. In that version, kernel32.dll located at address FS:[0x30]. is found in the third instead of the second position in the modules Condition P1. This fundamental constraint is the basis of our list [7]. A more generic and robust technique is to walk through the first detection heuristic (PEB). If during the execution of some in- list and check the actual name of each module until kernel32.dll put the following condition is true (P1): (i) the linear address of is found [7, 29]. In fact, the PEB_LDR_DATA structure contains FS:[0x30] is read, and (ii) the current or any previous instruc- two more lists of the loaded modules that differ in the order of the tion involved the FS register, then this input may correspond to a DLLs. All three lists are implemented as doubly linked lists, and shellcode that resolves kernel32.dll through the PEB. their corresponding LIST_ENTRY records contain two pointers to The second predicate is necessary for two reasons. First, it is the first (Flink) and last (Blink) entry in the list. useful for excluding random instructions in benign inputs that hap- Based on the above, and given that (i) kernel32.dll can pen to read from the linear address of FS:[0x30] without in- be resolved through any of the three lists, and (ii) list traversing volving the FS register. For example, if FS:[0x30] corresponds can be made in both directions, the third condition of the heuristic to address 0x7FFDF030 (as shown in the example of Fig. 3), the can be specified as follows (P3): the linear address of any of the following code will correctly not match the above condition: Flink or Blink pointers in the InLoadOrderModuleList, mov ebx, 0x7FFD0000 InMemoryOrderModuleList, or InInitializationOr- mov eax, [ebx+0xF030] ; eax = FS:[0x30] derModuleList records of the PEB_LDR_DATA structure is read. On the other hand, the memory access to FS:[0x30] can be made through an instruction that does not use the FS register di- 3.1.2 Backwards Searching rectly. For example, an attacker could take advantage of other seg- An alternative technique for locating kernel32.dll is to find ment registers and replace the first two lines in Fig. 2 with: a pointer that points somewhere into the memory area where the movax,fs ;ax=fs movbx,es ;preservees kernel32.dll has been loaded, and then search backwards un- moves,ax ;es=fs til the beginning of the DLL is located [27]. A reliable way to mov eax, es:[0x30] ; load FS:[0x30] to eax obtain a pointer into the address space of kernel32.dll is to moves,bx ;restorees take advantage of the Structured Exception Handling (SEH) mech- The code loads the segment selector of the FS register to ES (mov anism of Windows [21], which provides a unified way of handling between segment registers is not supported), reads the pointer to hardware and software exceptions. When an exception occurs, the the PEB, and then restores the original value of the ES register. exception dispatcher walks through a list of exception handlers for the shellcode will inevitably perform several memory accesses to the address space of kernel32.dll in order to check whether each 64KB-aligned address corresponds to the base address of the DLL. In our experiments with typical code injection attacks in Win- dows XP, the shellcode performed at least four memory reads in kernel32.dll. Thus, after the first two conditions have been met, we expect to encounter (B3): at least one memory read form the address space of kernel32.dll. 3.2 Process Memory Scanning Some memory corruption vulnerabilities allow only a limited space for the injected code—usually not enough for a fully func- tional shellcode. In most such exploits though the attacker can in- ject a second, much larger payload which however will land at a random, non-deterministic location, e.g., in a buffer allocated in the Figure 3: A snapshot of the TIB and the stack memory areas heap. The first-stage shellcode can then sweep the address space of of a typical Windows process. The SEH chain consisting of two the process and search for the second-stage shellcode (also known nodes is highlighted. as the “egg”), which can be identified by a long-enough character- istic byte sequence. This type of first-stage payload is known as “egg-hunt” shellcode [28]. Blindly searching the memory of a process in a reliable way re- the current thread and gives each handler the opportunity to handle quires some method of determining whether a given memory page the exception or pass it on to the next handler. The list is stored is mapped into the address space of the process. In the rest of this on the stack of each thread, and each node is a SEH frame that section, we describe two known memory scanning techniques and consists of two pointers to the next frame and the actual handler the corresponding detection heuristics that can capture these behav- routine. Figure 3 shows a typical snapshot of the TIB and the stack iors, and thus, identify the execution of egg-hunt shellcode. memory areas of a process with two SEH handlers. A pointer to the current SEH frame exists in the first field of the Thread Information 3.2.1 SEH Block and is always accessible through FS:[0]. The first memory scanning technique takes advantage of the struc- At the end of the SEH chain (bottom of the stack) there is a de- tured exception handling mechanism and relies on installing a cus- fault exception handler that is registered by the system for every tom exception handler that is invoked in case of a memory access thread. The Handler pointer of this SEH record points to a rou- violation. kernel32.dll tine that is located in , as shown in Fig. 3. Thus, Condition S1. As discussed in Sec. 3.1.2, the list of SEH frames FS:[0] the shellcode can start from and walk the SEH chain un- is stored on the stack, and the current SEH frame is always ac- til reaching the last SEH frame, and from there get a pointer into cessible through FS:[0]. The first-stage shellcode can register a kernel32.dll Handler by reading its field. custom exception handler that has priority over all previous han- Another technique to reach the last SEH frame, known as “TOP- dlers in two ways: create a new SEH frame and adjust the current STACK” [27], uses the stack of the exploited thread. The default SEH frame pointer of the TIB to point to it [28], or directly mod- exception handler is registered by the system during thread cre- ify the Handler pointer of the current SEH frame to point to the ation, making its relative location from the bottom of the stack attacker’s handler routine. In the first case, the shellcode must up- fairly stable. Although the absolute address of the stack may vary, date the SEH list head pointer at FS:[0], while in the second a pointer to the bottom of the stack is always found in the second case, it has to access the current SEH frame in order to modify FS:[0x4] Handler field of the TIB at . The pointer of the de- its Handler field, which is only possible by reading the pointer fault SEH handler can then be found 0x1C bytes into the stack, as at FS:[0]. Thus, the first condition of the SEH-based memory shown in Fig. 3. In fact, the TIB contains a second pointer to the scanning detection heuristic (SEH) is (S1): (i) the linear address FS:[0x8] top of the stack at . of FS:[0] is read or written, and (ii) the current or any previous Condition B1. Based on the same approach as in the previous instruction involved the FS register. section, the first condition for the detection heuristic (BACKWD) Condition S2. Another mandatory operation that will be encoun- that matches the “backwards searching” method is the following tered during execution is that the Handler field of the custom FS:[0] FS:[0x8] (B1): (i) any of the linear address between – SEH frame (irrespectively if its a new frame or an existing one) is read, and (ii) the current or any previous instruction involved the should be modified to point to the custom exception handler rou- FS register. The rationale is that a shellcode that uses the back- tine. This operation is reflected by the second condition (S2): the wards searching technique should unavoidably read either i) the linear address of the Handler field in the custom SEH frame is or FS:[0] memory location at for walking the SEH chain, or ii) one has been written. Note that in case of a newly created SEH frame, FS:[0x4] FS:[0x8] of the locations at and for accessing the the Handler pointer can be written before or after FS:[0] is stack directly. modified. Condition B2. In any case, the code will reach the default excep- Condition S3. Although the above conditions are quite constrain- Handler tion record on the stack and read its pointer. Since this ing, we can apply a third condition by exploiting the fact that upon kernel32.dll is a mandatory operation for landing into , we the registration of the custom SEH handler, the linked list of SEH can use this dependency as our second condition (B2): the linear frames should be valid. In the risk of stack corruption, the excep- Handler address of the field of the default SEH handler is read. tion dispatcher routine performs thorough checks on the integrity Condition B3. Finally, during the backwards searching phase, of the SEH chain, e.g., ensuring that each SEH frame is dword- 1 push edx ; preserve edx across system call 2 push 0x8 ploit by the direct use of system calls. Based on the above, a nec- 3 pop eax ;eax=NtAddAtom essary condition during the execution of a system call in egg-hunt 4 int 0x2e ;systemcall shellcode is (C1): the execution of an int 0x2e instruction with 5 cmp al, 0x05 ; check for STATUS_ACCESS_VIOLATION 6 pop edx ;restoreedx the eax register set to one of the following values: 0x2, 0x8, 0x39, 0x43, 0x46, 0x7F. Figure 4: A typical system call invocation for checking if the Condition C2. As shown in Sec. 5.2.2, condition C1 alone can supplied address is valid. happen to hold true during the execution of random code, although rarely. However, the heuristic can be strengthened based on the following observation. The egg-hunt shellcode will have to scan a aligned within the stack and is located higher than the previous large part of the address space until it finds the egg. Even when SEH frame [21]. Thus, the third condition requires that (S3): start- assuming that the egg can be located only at the beginning of a ing from FS:[0], all SEH frames should reside on the stack, and page [37], the shellcode will have to search hundreds or thousands the Handler field of the last frame should be set to 0xFFFFFFFF. of addresses, e.g., by repeatedly calling the code in Fig. 4 in a loop. In essence, the above condition validates that the custom handler Hence, condition C1 will hold several times. The detection heuris- registration has been performed correctly. tic (SYSCALL) can then be defined as a meta-condition (C{N}): 3.2.2 System Call C1 holds true N times. As shown in Sec. 5.2.2, a value of N = 2 does not produce any false positives. The extensive abuse of the SEH mechanism in various mem- In case other system calls can be used for validating an arbitrary ory corruption vulnerabilities led to the introduction of SafeSEH, a address, they can easily be included in the above condition. Start- linker option that produces a table with all the legitimate exception ing from Windows XP, system calls can also be made using the handlers of the image. In case the exploitation of some SafeSEH- more efficient sysenter instruction if it is supported by the sys- protected vulnerable application requires the use of egg-hunt shell- tem’s processor. The above heuristic can easily be extended to also code, an alternative but less reliable method for safely scanning support this type of system call invocation. the process address space is to check whether a page is mapped— before actually accessing it—using a system call [27, 28]. As al- 3.3 SEH-based GetPC Code ready discussed, although the use of system calls in Windows shell- Before decrypting itself, polymorphic shellcode needs to first code is not common, since they are prone to changes between OS find the absolute address at which it resides in the address space versions and do not provide crucial functionality such as network of the vulnerable process. The most widely used types of GetPC access, they can prove useful for determining if a memory address code for this purpose rely on some instruction from the call or is accessible. fstenv instruction groups [23]. These instructions push on the Some Windows system calls accept as an argument a pointer to stack the address of the following instruction, which can then be an input parameter. If the supplied pointer is invalid, the system call used to calculate the absolute address of the encrypted code. How- returns with a return value of STATUS_ACCESS_VIOLATION. ever, this type of GetPC code cannot be used in purely alphanu- Thus, the egg-hunt shellcode can check the return value of the sys- meric shellcode [19], because the opcodes of the required instruc- tem call, and proceed accordingly by searching for the egg or mov- tions fall outside the range of allowed ASCII bytes. In such cases, ing on to the next address [28]. In Windows, a system call is ini- the attacker can follow a different approach and take advantage of tiated by generating a software interrupt through the int 0x2e the SEH mechanism to get a handle to the absolute memory address instruction. of the injected shellcode [30]. Figure 4 shows a typical code that checks the address stored in When an exception occurs, the system generates an exception edx using the NtAddAtom system call. In Windows, a system record that contains the necessary information for handling the ex- call is initiated by generating a software interrupt through the int ception, including a snapshot of the execution state of the thread, 0x2e instruction (line 4). The actual system call that is going to be which contains the value of the program counter at the time the executed is specified by the value stored in the eax register (line exception was triggered. This information is stored on the stack, 3). Upon return from the system call, the code checks if the return so the shellcode can register a custom exception handler, trigger value equals the code for STATUS_ACCESS_VIOLATION. The an exception, and then extract the absolute memory address of the actual value of this code is 0xC0000005, but checking only the faulting instruction. By writing the handler routine on the heap, lower byte is enough in return for more compact code (line 5). this technique can work even in Windows XP SP3, bypassing any Condition C1. System call execution has several constraints that SEH protection mechanisms [30]. can be used for deriving a detection heuristic for this kind of egg- In essence, the SEH-based memory scanning detection heuris- hunt shellcode. First, the immediate operand of the int instruction tic described in Sec. 3.2.1 does not identify the scanning behavior should be set to 0x2E. Looking just for the int 0x2e instruction per se, but the proper registration of a custom exception handler. is clearly not enough since any two-byte instruction will be encoun- Although this is an inherent operation of any SEH-based egg-hunt tered roughly once every 64KB of arbitrary binary input. However, shellcode, any shellcode that installs a custom exception handler when encountering an int 0x2e instruction that corresponds to can be detected, including polymorphic shellcode that uses SEH- an actual system call execution, the ebx register should also have based GetPC code. been previously set to the proper system call number. The publicly available egg-hunt shellcode implementations we found (see Sec. 5.1) use one of the following system calls: NtAc- 4. IMPLEMENTATION cessCheckAndAuditAlarm (0x2), NtAddAtom (0x8), and We have implemented the proposed detection method in Gene, a NtDisplayString (0x39 in Windows 2000, 0x43 in XP, 0x46 network-level attack detector that uses a custom IA-32 emulator to in 2003 Server, and 0x7F in Vista). The variability of the system identify the presence of shellcode in network streams. Gene scans call number for NtDisplayString across the different Win- the client-initiated part of each TCP connection using the runtime dows versions is indicative of the complexity introduced in an ex- heuristics presented in this work. For evaluation purposes, a fifth GetPC-based self-decrypting shellcode similar to the one used in Gene GetPC Metasploit existing detectors [9, 23, 38] can be enabled at will. Since the ex- (Polymorphic) 15/15 act location of the shellcode in the input data is not known in ad- 15 samples 15/15 vance, the emulator repeats the execution multiple times, starting Metasploit (Plain) 15/15 from each and every position of the stream. In certain cases, how- 15 samples 0/15 ever, the execution of some code paths can be skipped to optimize Nepenthes 17/20 runtime performance [24]. 20 samples 15/20 The heuristics used in Gene are mostly based on memory ac- Individual Samples 31/33 33 samples cesses to certain locations in the address space of a vulnerable Win- 4/33 dows process. To emulate correctly the execution of these accesses, the virtual memory of the emulator is initialized with an image of 0 20 40 60 80 100 the complete address space of a typical Windows XP process taken Detected shellcodes (%) from a real system. The image consists of 971 pages (4KB each), including the stack, heap, PEB/TIB, and loaded modules. All four Figure 5: Number of shellcodes detected by Gene and the ex- heuristics use the same memory image and thus can be evaluated in isting GetPC-based heuristic [9, 23, 38] for different shellcode parallel during execution. sets. From a total of 83 different shellcode implementations, Among other initializations before the beginning of a new exe- Gene detected 78 samples (94%), compared to 34 (41%) for the cution [23], the segment register FS is set to the segment selector GetPC heuristic. corresponding to the base address of the Thread Information Block, the stack pointer is set accordingly, while any changes to the origi- erly. By manually unpacking the two payloads and scanning them nal process image from the previous execution are reverted. with Gene, in both cases the shellcode was identified by the PEB The runtime evaluation of the heuristics requires keeping some heuristic. From the rest 20 shellcodes, 16 were identified by the state about the occurrence of instructions with an operand that in- PEB heuristic, and one, named “Saalfeld,” by the SEH heuristic. volved the FS register, as well as about read and write accesses The Saalfeld shellcode is of particular interest due to the use of a to the memory locations specified in the heuristics. Regarding the custom SEH handler although it is not an egg-hunt shellcode. The SEH-based memory scanning heuristic (Sec. 3.2.1), although SEH SEH handler is registered for safely searching the address space of chain validation is more complex compared to other instrumenta- the vulnerable process starting from address 0x77E00000, with the tion operations, it is triggered only if conditions S1 and S2 are true, aim to reliably detect the base address of kernel32.dll. The which in practice happens very rarely. SEH heuristic identifies the proper registration of a custom SEH When an int 0x2e instruction is executed, the eax register handler, so the shellcode was successfully identified. is checked for a value corresponding to one of the system calls The remaining three shellcodes were missed due to the use of that can be used for memory scanning, as described in Sec. 3.2.2. hard-coded addresses, e.g., the linear address of kernel32.dll, Although the actual functionality of the system call is not emulated, instead of reliable base address resolution. It would be trivial to the proper return value is stored in the eax register depending on implement another detection heuristic similar to the PEB heuris- the validity of the supplied memory address. In case of an egg- tic based on commonly used hard-coded addresses in place of ad- hunt shellcode, this behavior allows the scanning loop to continue dressing based on the FS register to detect this kind of shellcode. normally, resulting to several system call invocations. However, these samples correspond to quite old attacks and this style naively implemented kind of shellcode is now encountered 5. EXPERIMENTAL EVALUATION rarely. From the 20 shellcodes, 15 are self-decrypting and are thus detected by the GetPC-based heuristic. 5.1 Detection Effectiveness Besides a few proof-of-concept implementations [5, 27] which We began our evaluation with the shellcodes contained in the are identified correctly by Gene, we were not able to find any other Metasploit Framework [2]. For Windows targets, Metasploit in- shellcode samples that locate kernel32.dll using backwards cludes six basic payloads for downloading and executing a file, searching, probably due to the simplicity of the alternative PEB- spawning a shell, adding a user account, and so on, as well as nine based technique. In addition to the Saalfeld shellcode, the SEH “stagers.” In contrast to an egg-hunt shellcode, which searches for heuristic detected a proof-of-concept SEH-based egg-hunt imple- a second payload that has already been injected into the vulnera- mentation [28], as well as the “omelet” shellcode [36], an egg-hunt ble process along with the egg-hunt shellcode, a stager establishes variation that locates and recombines multiple smaller eggs into a channel between the attacking and the victim host for upload- the whole original payload. The SEH heuristic was also effective ing other second-stage payloads. We generated plain (i.e., non- in detecting polymorphic shellcode that uses SEH-based GetPC encrypted) instances of the above 15 shellcodes, as well as an- code [30], which is currently missed by existing payload execution other 15 polymorphic instances of the same shellcodes using the systems. The SYSCALL heuristic was tested with three different ShikataGaNai encoder. As shown in Fig. 5, both Gene and the egg-hunt shellcode implementations [27,28,37], which were identi- GetPC-based heuristic detected the polymorphic versions of the fied correctly. In addition to these eight shellcode implementations, shellcodes. However, the original (plain) versions do not exhibit we gathered more Windows shellcode samples from public repos- any self-decrypting behavior and are thus detected only by Gene. itories [1, 3, 4], totaling 33 different samples. As shown in Fig. 5, For both plain and polymorphic versions, Gene identified the shell- the GetPC-based heuristic detected only four of the shellcodes that code using the PEB heuristic. The use of the PEB-based method use simple XOR encryption, while Gene detected all but two of the for locating kernel32.dll is probably preferred in Metasploit samples, again due to the use of hard-coded addresses. due to its reliability. Finally, as an extra verification experiment, we tested Gene with We continued our evaluation with 22 samples downloaded from a large dataset of real polymorphic attacks captured in production the shellcode repository of the Nepenthes Project [6]. Two of the networks by Nemu [22]. Without using any self-decryption heuris- samples had a broken decryptor and could not be executed prop- tic, this data set allows us to test the effectiveness of Gene in iden- tifying the actual plain shellcode after the decryption process has 60 completed. Gene analyzed more than 1.2 million attacks, which af- RPC ter the decryption process resulted to 98,602 unique payloads, and 50 all traffic in all cases it identified the decrypted plain shellcode correctly. Not port 80 surprisingly, all shellcodes were identified by the PEB heuristic. 40 5.2 Heuristic Robustness 30 20

5.2.1 False Positives Evaluation Throughput (Mbit/s) 10 We tested the robustness of the heuristics against false positives using a large and diverse set of benign inputs. For our first experi- 0 ment, we captured the internal and external traffic in two research 4K 8K 16K 32K 64K 128K and educational networks and kept the client-initiated stream of Execution threshold (log scale) each TCP flow, since currently Gene detects only attacks against network services. Collectively, the data set consists of 15.5 million Figure 7: The raw processing throughput of Gene for different streams, totaling more than 48GB of data. Depending on its size, a execution thresholds. stream can have from a few hundreds to many thousands of valid in- struction sequences which are all analyzed independently by Gene. Thus, we consider as a false positive any benign input with at least a mov ebx,fs:[eax] instruction is executed, it is more likely one instruction sequence that matches one of the heuristics. When that eax will have been zeroed out, e.g., due to a previous two- scanning the 15.5 million streams of this data set with Gene, none byte long xor eax,eax instruction, instead of being set to 0x30. of the inputs matched any of the heuristics, resulting to zero false However, the percentage of inputs that matched both the first and positives. the second condition is very low (0.0003% and 0.0004%, respec- Seeking more evidence for the resilience of the heuristics against tively), and no inputs matched all three conditions. false positives, we continued the experiments with a much larger As shown in Fig. 6(b), the overall behavior when operating on set of artificially generated benign data. The purpose of this ex- random binary data is comparable to that for network streams, with periment is to ensure that the random IA-32 machine code that is no inputs fully matching any of the heuristics. However, for ASCII derived by interpreting arbitrary data as code does not match any of data (Fig. 6(c)), although the first condition in the PEB, BACKWD, the heuristics. For this purpose, we used a script that continuously and SEH heuristics matched in roughly 0.03% of the inputs, there generates inputs of random binary and ASCII data that are subse- were no inputs matching any of the subsequent conditions. The op- quently scanned by Gene. The script generated 20 million 32KB- code for the int instruction falls outside the ASCII range, so no in- inputs of each type, totaling more than 1.3TB of data. The rationale put matched not even the first condition of the SYSCALL heuristic. behind using inputs consisting of random ASCII characters, in ad- Overall, all heuristics seem to perform even better when operating dition to random binary data, is to approximate the random code on ASCII data. found in network streams that use text-based protocols. Similarly to the previous experiment, the false positive rate was again kept at 5.3 Runtime Performance zero. We evaluated the processing throughput of Gene using the real network traffic traces presented in Sec. 5.2.1. Gene was running on 5.2.2 Heuristic Analysis a system with a Xeon 1.86GHz processor and 2GB of RAM. Fig- We repeated the experiments of the previous section with the aim ure 7 shows the raw processing throughput of Gene for different ex- to explore in depth the behavior of the heuristics when operating on ecution thresholds. The throughput is mainly affected by the num- benign data. This time we measured the number of inputs with at ber of CPU cycles spent on each input. As the execution threshold least one instruction sequence that matched the first, the first two, increases, the achieved throughput decreases because more emu- or all three conditions of a heuristic. lated instructions are executed per stream. A threshold in the order Figure 6(a) shows the percentage of network streams that matched of 8–16K instructions is sufficient for the detection of plain as well a given number of conditions. Out of 15.5 million inputs, only 82 as the most advanced polymorphic shellcodes [24]. For port 80 (0.0005%) had an instruction sequence with a memory access to traffic, the random code due to ASCII data tends to form long in- FS:[0x30] through the FS register—satisfying the first condi- struction sequences that result to degraded performance compared tion of the PEB heuristic. There were no streams that matched both to binary data. the first and the second or all three conditions, which is a promis- The overall runtime throughput is slightly lower compared to ex- ing indication for the robustness of the PEB heuristic since all three isting emulation-based detectors [23,24] due to the overhead added conditions must be true for flagging an input as shellcode. The by the virtual memory subsystem, as well as because Gene does SYSCALL heuristic had a similar behavior, with just 51 of the in- not use the zero-delimited chunk optimization used in these sys- puts (0.0003%) exhibiting a single system call invocation, while tems [23]. Previous approaches skip the execution of zero-byte de- there were no streams with two or more system calls. limited regions smaller than 50 bytes, with the rationale that most A much larger number of streams matched the first condition of memory corruption vulnerabilities cannot be exploited if the attack the BACKWD and SEH heuristics (8,620 and 41,063 streams, re- vector contains null bytes. However, the detection heuristics of spectively). In both heuristics, the first condition includes a mem- Gene can identify shellcode in other attack vectors that may contain ory access to FS:[0], which seems to appear more frequently null bytes, such as document files. Furthermore, our approach can in random code compared to accesses at FS:[0x30]. A possi- be applied in other domains [14, 15], for example for the detection ble explanation for this is that the effective address computation in of client-side attacks, in which the shellcode is usually encrypted the memory operand of some instruction can result to zero with a at a higher level using some script language, and thus can be fully higher probability compared to other values. For example, when functional even if it contains null bytes. antecuetepsiiiyta hr r te id of kinds other are there cour that Of possibility classes. the shellcode exclude different of cannot range broad a detect DISCUSSION 6. positives. false a any shellcode, c encountered actual not we to have corresponds [22] we it code cases all machine in identified that firmed the analyzing statically appr detection By shellcode incr polymorphic Thi shellcode existing to plain atta compared injection detect shellcode. code to server-side self-decrypting for Gene coverage detection of of the ability form the any that use means 31,36 not i.e., attacks, did 85,144 (27%) by only triggered was heuristic fteatcs uprigtefc htti stems wide most the is resolving this that for fact technique the supporting matched attacks, heuristic the PEB of The approaches. ex both of in th coverage used compare tion heuristic to us GetPC allowing the detectors, as shellcode well polymorphic as paper, this in sented 139 135, 80, ports against attacks also 2967. targeted were attacks the there of while probab 86% 445, PCs, About internal malware. from by launched infected Alm were ready attacks sen service. the and vulnerable of connect potentially third to the able previou to was been input attacker had malicious the cases might all systems infect in many actually patched, since attacks the host, of targeted many the how netwo know two cannot these injection we in code hosts though external 116,513 and detected internal has against Gene tacks 2010, interna April selected 17 between of de- traffic As the two as these well netwo as internal In Internet, the the between 2009. traffic the November scans 25 Gene ployments, since operational been has Deployment Real-world 5.4 se field protocol each inspecting by rately. throughput i significantly scanning the would the Augmenting parsing protocol used. with protocol kn engine network any spection without actual blindly, the input about Further whole edge the packets. scans dropping without currently s Mbit/s Gene 100 can to Gene up networks, of traffic production (respons in traffic deployments server-initiated the preliminary of ( fraction traffic a client-initiated usually because attacks server-side for fals randoml zero million to r resulting 20 conditions, million three (c) 15.5 all and matched (a) inputs (650GB), with inputs evaluation binary positives generated False 6: Figure h utm ersispeetdi hsppralw eet Gene allows paper this in presented heuristics runtime The nbt elyet,Gn sstefu e ersispre- heuristics new four the uses Gene deployments, both In it where networks, University two in Gene deployed have We scanning when links speed high monitor can Gene practice, In Matching streams (%) 0.001 0.01 0.1 0 1 E AKDSHSYSCALL SEH BACKWD PEB (a) Benignnetworkstreams kernel32.dll Conditions 1+2+3 Conditions 1+2 Condition 1 oee,teGetPC the However, .

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Matching inputs (%) 0.001 0.01 0.1 0 1 E AKDSHSYSCALL SEH BACKWD PEB (c) RandomASCIIdata Conditions 1+2+3 Conditions 1+2 Condition 1 n thus and , ercentage fr any efore oethat code swarm a ndomly spend o entially nthe On though ueof ture quite e t ad- ete option eval- l time e detec- detec- loop e im- to ments ccess dows ution the f rvice ation lin- ll the n such hen tics ave use xe- the the nd es ic s - Some of the operations matched by the heuristics, such as the web pages based on various indications, including the presence of registration of a custom exception handler, might also be found in shellcode. The CPU emulator in both projects is based on libemu. legitimate executables. However, Gene is tailored for scanning in- Shellcode analysis systems help analysts study and understand puts that otherwise should not contain executable IA-32 code. In the structure and functionality of a shellcode sample. Ma et al. [18] case of file uploads, Gene can easily be extended to identify and used code emulation to extract the actual runtime instruction se- extract executable files by looking for executables’ headers in the quence of shellcode samples captured in the wild. Spector [11] uses inspected traffic, and then pass them on to a virus scanner. symbolic execution to extract the sequence of library calls made by the shellcode, along with their arguments, and at the end of the 7. RELATED WORK execution generates a low-level execution trace. Yataglass [25] im- proves the analysis capabilities of Spector by handling shellcode Having realised the limitations of signature-based approaches in that uses memory-scanning attacks. the face of polymorphic code and targeted attacks, several research efforts turned to static binary code analysis for identifying the pres- ence of shellcode in network streams. One of the first such ap- 8. CONCLUSION proaches by Toth and Kruegel uses code disassembly on network The increasing professionalism of cyber criminals and the vast streams to identify the NOP-sled that sometimes precedes the shell- number of malware variants and malicious websites make the need code [33]. Focusing on the shellcode itself, Anderson et al. [8] for effective code injection attack detection a critical challenge. propose to scan each input for multiple occurrences of instruction To this end, shellcode detection using payload execution offers sequences that end with an int 0x80 instruction for the identifi- important advantages, including generic detection without exploit cation of Linux shellcode, with the rationale that the shellcode will or vulnerability-specific signatures, practically zero false positives, have to execute several system calls. Other detection methods that while it is effective against targeted attacks. use static code analysis aim to detect previously unknown polymor- In this paper we present a comprehensive shellcode detection phic shellcode based on the identification of structural similarities method based on code emulation. Our approach expands the range among different worm instances [17], control and data flow analy- of malicious code types that can be detected by enabling the parallel sis [12, 34, 35], or neural networks [20]. evaluation of multiple runtime heuristics that match inherent low- However, methods based on static analysis can be easily evaded level operations during the execution of different shellcode types. by malicious code that uses obfuscation methods such as indirect The runtime heuristics presented in this work enable the effective jumps and self-modifications [23], which are widely used by cur- detection of plain and metamorphic shellcode, both of which are rent malware packers and polymorphic shellcode engines. In con- not identified by existing shellcode detectors. This is achieved re- trast, emulation-based detection can correctly handle even exten- gardless of the use of self-modifying code or dynamic code gen- sively obfuscated malicious code [23]. Polychronakis et al. pro- eration, on which existing emulation-based polymorphic shellcode pose the use of code emulation for the detection of self decrypt- detectors are exclusively based. ing shellcode at the network level [23, 24]. The detection algo- Our experimental evaluation shows that the proposed approach rithm is based on the identification of the GetPC code and the can effectively detect a broad range of diverse shellcode types and self-references that take place during the execution of the shell- implementations, increasing significantly the detection coverage code. Zhang et al. propose to combine network-level emulation compared to existing emulation-based detectors, while extensive with static and data flow analysis for improving the runtime perfor- testing with a large set of benign data did not produce any false mance of the GetPC heuristic [38]. positives. Gene, our prototype implementation of the proposed Libemu [9] is an open-source x86 emulation library tailored to technique for the detection of server-side code injection attacks de- shellcode analysis and detection. Shellcode execution is identified tected 116,513 attacks against production systems in a period of using the GetPC heuristic. Libemu can also emulate the execution almost five months without false positives. of Windows API calls by creating a minimalistic process environ- Although Gene currently operates at the network level, the pro- ment that allows the user to install custom hooks to API functions. posed detection heuristics can be readily implemented in emulation- Although the actual execution of API functions can be used as an based systems in other domains, including host-level or application- indication for the execution of shellcode, these actions will be ob- specific detectors. As part of our future work, we plan to implement served only after kernel32.dll has been resolved and the re- more heuristics to cover the detection of less widely used shellcode quired API functions have been located through the EDT or IAT. types, such as shellcode that uses hard-coded addresses, and ex- Compared to the kernel32.dll resolution heuristics presented plore the design of a description language that would expedite the in Section 3.1, this technique would require the execution of a much development of new heuristics. larger number of instructions until the first API function is called, and also the emulation of the actual functionality of each API call Acknowledgments thereafter. This means that the execution threshold of the detector We would like to thank Periklis Akritidis and Angelos Keromytis for their should be set much higher, resulting to degraded runtime perfor- valuable feedback on earlier versions of this paper. This work was sup- mance. For applications in which the emulator can spend more ported in part by the Marie Curie FP7-PEOPLE-2009-IOF project MAL- cycles on each input, both heuristics can coexist and operate in par- CODE and the FP7 project SysSec, funded by the European Commission allel, e.g., along with all other heuristics used in Gene, offering under Grant Agreements No. 254116 and No. 257007, and by the project even better detection accuracy. i-Code, funded by the Prevention, Preparedness and Consequence Manage- Besides the detection of code injection attacks against network ment of Terrorism and other Security-related Risks Programme of the Eu- services [22], emulation-based shellcode detection using the GetPC ropean Commission—Directorate-General for Home Affairs under Grant heuristic has been used for the detection of drive-by download at- Agreement No. JLS/2009/CIPS/AG/C2-050. This publication reflects the tacks and malicious web sites. Egele et al. [14] propose a technique views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsi- that uses a browser-embedded CPU emulator to identify javascript ble for any use which may be made of the information contained herein. string buffers that contain shellcode. Wepawet [15] is a service for Michalis Polychronakis is also with FORTH-ICS. Evangelos Markatos is web-based malware detection that scans and identifies malicious also with the University of Crete. 9. REFERENCES microsoft.com/msj/0197/exception/exception.aspx. [22] M. Polychronakis, K. G. Anagnostakis, and E. P. Markatos. [1] Goodfellas security research team. An empirical study of real-world polymorphic code injection http://goodfellas.shellcode.com.ar/. attacks. In Proceedings of the 2nd USENIX Workshop on [2] The metasploit project. http://www.metasploit.com/. Large-scale Exploits and Emergent Threats (LEET), April [3] milw0rm. http://milw0rm.com/shellcode/win32/. 2009. 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