Introduction

DRAKVUF™ is a virtualization based agentless black-box binary analysis system. DRAKVUF™ allows for in-depth execution tracing of arbitrary binaries (including operating systems), all without having to install any special software within the virtual machine used for analysis.

Hardware requirements

DRAKVUF™ uses hardware virtualization extensions found in Intel CPUs. You will need an Intel CPU with virtualization support (VT-x) and with Extended Page Tables (EPT). DRAKVUF™ is not going to work on any other CPUs (such as AMD) or on Intel CPUs without the required virtualization extensions.

Supported guests

DRAKVUF™ currently supports monitoring the following operating systems:

Windows 7-8, both 32-bit and 64-bit

Windows 10 64-bit

Linux 2.6.x - 5.x, both 32-bit and 64-bit

Malware analysis

DRAKVUF™ provides a perfect platform for stealthy malware analysis as its footprint is nearly undectebable from the malware's perspective. While DRAKVUF has been mainly developed with malware analysis in mind, it is certainly not limited to that task as it can be used to monitor the execution of arbitrary binaries.

Demos

Using DRAKVUF™ to trace Windows internal kernel functions, including heap allocations.

This demo shows the process injection component of DRAKVUF™ that can start arbitrary executables within the guest, without the aid of any in-guest helper. In the demo we hijack the execution of the standard Windows Task Manager to initiate the execution of our tasks.

Extracting deleted files from memory before they are actually discarded by the operating system. Many files created by malware droppes are only present in memory and never show up on disk.

Presentations

This is a presentation describing the system at the Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC) 2014

This presentation also describes some of the features of DRAKVUF™, which was released at Hacktivity in 2014

Our latest talk at Hacktivity 2016 sheds more light on DRAKVUF™'s internals and recent developments

Current status

Currently the following core features are available:

Agentless start of binary execution.

Agentless monitoring of Windows internal kernel functions.

Cloning of analysis VMs via copy-on-write memory and disk.

Guest multi-vCPU support.

Plugins are also available for Windows to monitor several system aspects, for example:

Tracing heap allocations.

Tracing files being accessed.

Extracting files from memory before they are deleted.

Tracing UDP and TCP connections

There are many opportunities to improve and extend DRAKVUF™. Take a look at our Issues page and also, just to name a few more:

Structured logging into MySQL/MongoDB.

Automatic submission of extracted files to VirusTotal.

Run-time deduplication of unused memory with Xen's memory sharing.

Integration into malware analysis operations, such as HOLMES.

As DRAKVUF™ is an open-source project, patches and bug reports are always welcome on the Github page! More information can be found in the DRAKVUF™ Wiki about working with the project.

Installation guide

UPDATED 8/23/2020 DRAKVUF™ now runs best on Xen 4.14

The system has been mainly tested on Debian Buster and Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. You can find pre-built debian packages of the latest DRAKVUF builds at https://github.com/tklengyel/drakvuf-builds/releases

To build DRAKVUF™ from source the following packages are normally required Debian based Linux distros:

sudo apt-get install wget git bcc bin86 gawk bridge-utils iproute2 libcurl4-openssl-dev bzip2 libpci-dev build-essential make gcc clang libc6-dev libc6-dev-i386 linux-libc-dev zlib1g-dev libncurses5-dev patch libvncserver-dev libssl-dev libsdl-dev iasl libbz2-dev e2fslibs-dev git-core uuid-dev ocaml libx11-dev bison flex ocaml-findlib xz-utils gettext libyajl-dev libpixman-1-dev libaio-dev libfdt-dev cabextract libglib2.0-dev autoconf automake libtool libjson-c-dev libfuse-dev liblzma-dev autoconf-archive kpartx python3-dev python3-pip golang python-dev libsystemd-dev

Some python packages are unfortunately quite old in Debian so we will install them with Python's pip3 tool:

sudo pip3 install pefile construct

cd ~ git clone https://github.com/tklengyel/drakvuf cd drakvuf git submodule update --init cd xen ./configure --enable-githttp --disable-pvshim make -j4 dist-xen make -j4 dist-tools

sudo su make -j4 install-xen make -j4 install-tools echo "GRUB_CMDLINE_XEN_DEFAULT=\"dom0_mem=4096M,max:4096M dom0_max_vcpus=4 dom0_vcpus_pin=1 force-ept=1 ept=pml=0 hap_1gb=0 hap_2mb=0 altp2m=1 smt=0\"" >> /etc/default/grub echo "/usr/local/lib" > /etc/ld.so.conf.d/xen.conf ldconfig echo "none /proc/xen xenfs defaults,nofail 0 0" >> /etc/fstab echo "xen-evtchn" >> /etc/modules echo "xen-privcmd" >> /etc/modules systemctl enable xen-qemu-dom0-disk-backend.service systemctl enable xen-init-dom0.service systemctl enable xenconsoled.service

update-grub reboot

To install Xen with dom0 getting 4GB RAM assigned and two dedicated CPU cores (tune it as preferred):Once you are done with these steps, you can finalize your setup:

Also make sure you are running a relatively recent kernel (anything above 3.8 should just work).

uname -r

sudo xen-detect

xl list

Name ID Mem VCPUs State Time(s) Domain-0 0 4096 2 r----- 614.0

lvcreate -L20G -n windows7-sp1 vg

arch = 'x86_64' name = "windows7-sp1" maxmem = 3000 memory = 3000 vcpus = 2 maxvcpus = 2 builder = "hvm" boot = "cd" hap = 1 on_poweroff = "destroy" on_reboot = "destroy" on_crash = "destroy" vnc = 1 vnclisten = "0.0.0.0" vga = "stdvga" usb = 1 usbdevice = "tablet" audio = 1 soundhw = "hda" viridian = 1 altp2m = 2 shadow_memory = 32 vif = [ 'type=ioemu,model=e1000,bridge=xenbr0' ] disk = [ 'phy:/dev/vg/windows7-sp1,hda,w', 'file:/path/to/your/windows7.iso,hdc:cdrom,r' ]

cd ~/drakvuf/libvmi autoreconf -vif ./configure --disable-kvm --disable-bareflank --disable-file make sudo make install sudo echo "export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=\$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/usr/local/lib" >> ~/.bashrc

cd ~/drakvuf/volatility3 python3 ./setup.py build sudo python3 ./setup.py install

$ sudo xl list Name ID Mem VCPUs State Time(s) Domain-0 0 4024 4 r----- 848.8 windows7-sp1-x86 7 3000 1 -b---- 94.7 $ sudo vmi-win-guid name windows7-sp1-x86 Windows Kernel found @ 0x2604000 Version: 32-bit Windows 7 PE GUID: 4ce78a09412000 PDB GUID: 684da42a30cc450f81c535b4d18944b12 Kernel filename: ntkrpamp.pdb Multi-processor with PAE (version 5.0 and higher) Signature: 17744. Machine: 332. # of sections: 22. # of symbols: 0. Timestamp: 1290242569. Characteristics: 290. Optional header size: 224. Optional header type: 0x10b Section 1: .text Section 2: _PAGELK Section 3: POOLMI Section 4: POOLCODE Section 5: .data Section 6: ALMOSTRO Section 7: SPINLOCK Section 8: PAGE Section 9: PAGELK Section 10: PAGEKD Section 11: PAGEVRFY Section 12: PAGEHDLS Section 13: PAGEBGFX Section 14: PAGEVRFB Section 15: .edata Section 16: PAGEDATA Section 17: PAGEKDD Section 18: PAGEVRFC Section 19: PAGEVRFD Section 20: INIT Section 21: .rsrc Section 22: .reloc

PDB GUID: 684da42a30cc450f81c535b4d18944b12 Kernel filename: ntkrpamp.pdb

sudo su kpartx -a /dev/vg/windows7 mount -o ro /dev/mapper/vg-windows7p1 /mnt python3 tools/pdbguid.py /mnt/Windows/System32/ntoskrnl.exe umount /mnt kpartx -d /dev/vg/windows7

cd /tmp python3 ~/drakvuf/volatility3/volatility/framework/symbols/windows/pdbconv.py --guid 684da42a30cc450f81c535b4d18944b12 -p ntkrpamp.pdb -o windows7-sp1.json sudo mv windows7-sp1.json /root

sudo su printf "windows7-sp1 {

\tvolatility_ist = \"/root/windows7-sp1.json\";

}" >> /etc/libvmi.conf exit

sudo vmi-process-list windows7-sp1

Process listing for VM windows7-sp1 (id=7) [ 4] System (struct addr:84aba980) [ 220] smss.exe (struct addr:85a44020) [ 300] csrss.exe (struct addr:85f67a68) [ 336] wininit.exe (struct addr:8601e030) [ 348] csrss.exe (struct addr:84ba4030) [ 384] winlogon.exe (struct addr:85966d40) [ 444] services.exe (struct addr:8614c030) [ 460] lsass.exe (struct addr:86171030) [ 468] lsm.exe (struct addr:8617b4f8) [ 564] svchost.exe (struct addr:861d9bc8) [ 628] svchost.exe (struct addr:863fb8a8) [ 816] sppsvc.exe (struct addr:86426838) [ 856] svchost.exe (struct addr:854abd40) [ 880] svchost.exe (struct addr:854c5030) [ 916] svchost.exe (struct addr:854d7a70) [ 1240] svchost.exe (struct addr:8614cb80) [ 1280] svchost.exe (struct addr:854f7d40) [ 1608] spoolsv.exe (struct addr:85578660) [ 1636] svchost.exe (struct addr:85554af0) [ 792] SearchIndexer. (struct addr:8562ac08) [ 1128] taskhost.exe (struct addr:858d9d40) [ 1524] dwm.exe (struct addr:857f3a60) [ 1728] explorer.exe (struct addr:858d9180) [ 1720] regsvr32.exe (struct addr:8605f398) [ 248] svchost.exe (struct addr:863ed030) [ 1024] svchost.exe (struct addr:86420390) [ 256] WmiPrvSE.exe (struct addr:854014a0)

ssh root@linux echo "Kernel version: "$(uname -r) apt-get install linux-image-$(uname -r)-dbg exit

cd ~/drakvuf/dwarf2json go build sudo su kpartx -a /dev/vg/linux mount -o ro /dev/mapper/vg-linux1 /mnt ./dwarf2json linux --system-map /mnt/boot/System.map-5.3.0-0.bpo.2-amd64 --elf /mnt/usr/lib/debug/vmlinux-5.3.0-0.bpo.2-amd64 > /root/linux.json umount /mnt kpartx -d /dev/vg/linux printf "linux {

\tvolatility_ist = \"/root/linux.json\";

}" >> /etc/libvmi.conf

sudo vmi-process-list linux Process listing for VM linux (id=29) [ 0] swapper/0 (struct addr:ffffffff8181a460) [ 1] systemd (struct addr:ffff88007b3a92b0) [ 2] kthreadd (struct addr:ffff88007b3a8960) [ 3] ksoftirqd/0 (struct addr:ffff88007b3a8010) [ 5] kworker/0:0H (struct addr:ffff88007a8109a0) [ 6] kworker/u2:0 (struct addr:ffff88007a810050) [ 7] rcu_sched (struct addr:ffff88007a847330) [ 8] rcu_bh (struct addr:ffff88007a8469e0) [ 9] migration/0 (struct addr:ffff88007a846090) [ 10] watchdog/0 (struct addr:ffff88007a85f370) [ 11] khelper (struct addr:ffff88007a85ea20) [ 12] kdevtmpfs (struct addr:ffff88007a85e0d0) [ 13] netns (struct addr:ffff88007a8d13b0) [ 14] xenwatch (struct addr:ffff88007a8d0a60) [ 15] xenbus (struct addr:ffff88007a8d0110) [ 17] khungtaskd (struct addr:ffff88007a902aa0) [ 18] writeback (struct addr:ffff88007a902150) [ 19] ksmd (struct addr:ffff88007a935430) [ 20] khugepaged (struct addr:ffff88007a934ae0) [ 21] crypto (struct addr:ffff88007a934190) [ 22] kintegrityd (struct addr:ffff88007a93f470) [ 23] bioset (struct addr:ffff88007a93eb20) [ 24] kblockd (struct addr:ffff88007a93e1d0) [ 25] kswapd0 (struct addr:ffff8800776d34b0) [ 26] vmstat (struct addr:ffff8800776d2b60) [ 27] fsnotify_mark (struct addr:ffff8800776d2210) [ 33] kthrotld (struct addr:ffff88007770c290)

cd ~/drakvuf autoreconf -vi ./configure make

sudo ./src/drakvuf -r <path to json config file> -d <domid>

sudo ./src/drakvuf -r /root/windows7-sp1.json -d 7

./src/drakvuf

Optional: Generate usermode profiles

.dll

.sys

tcpip.sys

C:\Windows\System32\drivers\tcpip.sys

python3 ~/drakvuf/tools/pdbguid.py tcpip.sys python3 ~/drakvuf/volatility3/volatility/framework/symbols/windows/pdbconv.py --guid abb23d00ee7e4165b6aff66f2df02eb22 -p tcpip.pdb -o tcpip.json

Once you are booted into Xen, verify that everything works as such:The output should be: Running in PV context on XenThe output should be something similar:Setup an LVM Volume Group to hold your VMs disks ( see this tutorial for help ), then create a volume:Install Windows 7 from your ISO using the following template (tune it as needed):Enter the LibVMI folder in and build it:Now we will create the JSON configuration file for the Windows domain. First, we need to get the debug information for the Windows kernel via the LibVMI vmi-win-guid tool. For example, in the following my domain is named windows7-sp1-x86:The important fields are:If vmi-win-guid fails to find the Windows kernel in memory, you can gather the required information from the VM's disk directly by examining ntoskrnl.exe:Now generate the JSON configuration file (make sure to adjust the kernel name and GUID as necessary):With this profile ready we can create the LibVMI config:Test if LibVMI is working by running vmi-process-list:Output should be something similar:For Linux you need to install the target kernel's debug package (to get the DWARF symbols for the kernel):We will use the dwarf2json tool to convert the debug information into the required JSON configuration file. Make note of the Kernel version of the target and make sure to update the System.map and vmlinux paths to reflect the correct kernel version:Now running vmi-process-list should show a similar output:Now we are ready to build and install DRAKVUF™:To simply trace the execution of the system:For example:To see all available options:DRAKVUF™ has some enhanced functionality which can be enabled by providing necessary JSON configuration file for particularorfiles. For instance, network monitoring plugin (socketmon) requires the creation of a JSON config file for thekernel module, which is normally located at. You will need to copy this file to where you will be generating the JSON configuration file at. You can generate the JSON configuration file for it similar to how you generated the one for the Windows kernel:

You should provide the path to the JSON configuration file by using DRAKVUF™'s -T or --json-tcpip command line option. Type drakvuf --help in order to display the list of auxilary JSON configuration files that are accepted by DRAKVUF™ and the corresponding command line options.

Citation

@inproceedings{lengyel2014drakvuf, author = {Lengyel, Tamas K. and Maresca, Steve and Payne, Bryan D. and Webster, George D. and Vogl, Sebastian and Kiayias, Aggelos}, title = {Scalability, Fidelity and Stealth in the DRAKVUF Dynamic Malware Analysis System}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 30th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference}, year = {2014} }

If you use DRAKVUF™ in an academic project, please cite using the following bibtex key: