Frida 10.5 Released ∞

release

The midnight oil has been burning and countless cups of coffee have been consumed here at NowSecure, and boy do we have news for you this time.

Continuing in the spirit of last release’ low-level bag of goodies, we’ll be moving one level up the stack this time. We are going to introduce a brand new way to use new CodeWriter APIs, enabling you to weave in your own instructions into the machine code executed by any thread of your choosing. We’re talking lazy dynamic recompilation on a per-thread basis, with precise control of the compilation process.

But first a little background. Most people using Frida are probably using the Interceptor API to perform inline hooking, and/or doing method swizzling or replacement through the ObjC and Java APIs. The idea is typically to modify some interesting API that you expect to be called, and be able to divert execution to your own code in order to observe, augment, or fully replace application behavior.

One drawback to such approaches is that code or data is modified, and such changes can be trivially detected. This is fine though, as being invisible to the hosting process’ own code is always going to be a cat and mouse game when doing in-process instrumentation.

These techniques are however quite limited when trying to answer the question of “behind this private API, which other APIs actually get called for a given input?”. Or, when doing reversing and fuzzing, you might want to know where execution diverges between two known inputs to a given function. Another example is measuring code coverage. You could use Interceptor’s support for instruction-level probes, first using a static analysis tool to find all the basic blocks and then using Frida to put single-shot probes all over the place.

Enter Stalker. It’s not a new API, but it’s been fairly limited in what it allowed you to do. Think of it as a per-thread code-tracer, where the thread’s original machine code is dynamically recompiled to new memory locations in order to weave in instrumentation between the original instructions.

It does this recompilation lazily, one basic-block at a time. Considering that a lot of self-modifying code exists, it is careful about caching compiled blocks in case the original code changes after the fact.

Stalker also goes to great lengths to recompile the code such that side-effects are identical. E.g. if the original instruction is a CALL it will make sure that the address of the original next instruction is what’s pushed on the stack, and not the address of the next recompiled instruction.

Anyway, Stalker has historically been like a pet project inside of a pet project. A lot of fun, but other parts of Frida received most of my attention over the years. There have been some awesome exceptions though. Me and @karltk did some fun pair-programming sessions many years ago when we sat down and decided to get Stalker working well on hostile code. At some later point I put together CryptoShark in order get people excited about its potential. Some time went by and suddenly Stalker received a critical bug-fix contributed by Eloi Vanderbeken. Early this year, Antonio Ken Iannillo jumped on board and ported it to arm64. Then, very recently, Erik Smit showed up and fixed a critical bug where we would produce invalid code for REP-prefixed JCC instructions. Yay!

Stalker’s API has so far been really limited. You can tell it to follow a thread, including the thread you’re in, which is useful in combination with inline hooking, i.e. Interceptor. The only two things you could do was:

Tell it which events you’re interested in, e.g. call: true , which will produce one event per CALL instruction. This means Stalker will add some logging code before each such instruction, and that would log where the CALL happened, its target, and its stack depth. The other event types are very similar. Add your own call probes for specific targets, giving you a synchronous callback into JavaScript when a CALL is made to a specific target.

I’m super-excited to announce that we’ve just introduced a third thing you can do with this API, and this one is a game changer. You can now customize the recompilation process, and it’s really easy:

var appModule = Process . enumerateModulesSync ()[ 0 ]; var appStart = appModule . base ; var appEnd = appStart . add ( appModule . size ); Process . enumerateThreadsSync (). forEach ( function ( thread ) { console . log ( 'Stalking ' + thread . id ); Stalker . follow ( thread . id , { transform : function ( iterator ) { var instruction = iterator . next (); var startAddress = instruction . address ; var isAppCode = startAddress . compare ( appStart ) >= 0 && startAddress . compare ( appEnd ) === - 1 ; do { if ( isAppCode && instruction . mnemonic === 'ret' ) { iterator . putCmpRegI32 ( 'eax' , 60 ); iterator . putJccShortLabel ( 'jb' , 'nope' , 'no-hint' ); iterator . putCmpRegI32 ( 'eax' , 90 ); iterator . putJccShortLabel ( 'ja' , 'nope' , 'no-hint' ); iterator . putCallout ( onMatch ); iterator . putLabel ( 'nope' ); } iterator . keep (); } while (( instruction = iterator . next ()) !== null ); } }); }); function onMatch ( context ) { console . log ( 'Match! pc=' + context . pc + ' rax=' + context . rax . toInt32 ()); }

The transform callback gets called synchronously whenever a new basic block is about to be compiled. It gives you an iterator that you then use to drive the recompilation-process forward, one instruction at a time. The returned Instruction tells you what you need to know about the instruction that’s about to be recompiled. You then call keep() to allow Stalker to recompile it as it normally would. This means you can omit this call if you want to skip some instructions, e.g. because you’ve replaced them with your own code. The iterator also allows you to insert your own instructions, as it exposes the full CodeWriter API of the current architecture, e.g. X86Writer.

The example above determines where the application’s own code is in memory, and adds a few extra instructions before every RET instruction in any code belonging to the application itself. This code checks if eax contains a value between 60 and 90, and if it does, calls out to JavaScript to let it implement arbitrarily complex logic. This callback can read and modify registers as it pleases. What’s nice about this approach is that you can insert code into hot code-paths and selectively call into JavaScript, making it easy to do really fast checks in machine code but offload more complex tasks to a higher level language. You can also Memory.alloc() and have the generated code write directly there, without entering into JavaScript at all.

So that’s the big new thing in 10.5. Special thanks to @asabil who helped shape this new API.

In closing, the only other big change is that the Instruction API now exposes a lot more details of the underlying Capstone instruction. Stalker also uses a lot less memory on both x86 and arm64, and is also more reliable. Lastly, Process.setExceptionHandler() is now a documented API, along with our SQLite API.

Enjoy!