Welcome back!

This is a small post about a quick util that I created yesterday’s night while working on a side project. Mountain Lion introduced kernel ASLR and the kextstat util output doesn’t support (yet?) this feature. The addresses are not the real ones and this is quite annoying (kgmacros from kernel debugging kit also seem to fail at this!).

What this util does is to read the kernel extensions information via the /dev/kmem device (hence this util is probably not useful for a large audience) and display it like kextstat does with the correct address for each kext (just the most important information, the linked against info might be added in the future).

Besides being useful for anyone wanting to read the kexts information, it’s also useful for rootkits because it implements the trick that Crisis uses to retrieve this information for 64 bit kernels (my posts were against the 32 bit version). The only piece left is how to find the sLoadedKexts symbol. Here it’s hardcoded for version 10.8.2. I do have a nice trick to find it but it’s not ready for public consumption. First I want to see if it’s possible to implement my new idea.

Due to some whacky reason I was convinced that each kernel extension had individual ASLR slide values, which after I got this util working was demonstrated false. The slide is the same as the kernel. I probably had some mistake while searching manually for the kexts. Practice makes perfection and part of this code was needed for my new project so it’s not wasted time!

The code is located at https://github.com/gdbinit/kextstat_aslr.

One feature to be added is to “bruteforce” the whole sLoadedKexts array. The reason is that rootkits usually decrease the count but the information remains there. Since the class has a capacity instance variable, we can move beyond the count and check if there’s anything suspicious there. Just a fun detail.

The last detail is that this is susceptible to changes to OSArray and OSKext classes since it’s using offsets into the instance variables. The best way would be to get this ported to C++ but I still have to read a book or two on C++. Need to verify how stable are these classes since Snow Leopard.

Phew, too many written words for such small util!

Have fun,

fG!

Update:

There is a privileged syscall called kas_info() that allows to retrieve kernel ASLR value. I’ve updated the code to use this feature.