Most binary hooking engines write a detour in the entry point of the target function. Other hooking engines patch the IAT table, and so on. One of the problems with overwriting the entry point with a JMP instruction is that you need enough room for that instruction, usually a mere 5 bytes will suffice.

How do the hooking algorithms decide how much is “enough”?

Pretty easy, they use a dissasembler to query the size of each instruction they scan, so if the total size of the instructions that were scanned is more than 5 bytes, they’re done.

As an example, usually, functions start with these two instructions:

PUSH EBP

MOV EBP, ESP

which take only 3 bytes. And we already said that we need 5 bytes total, in order to replace the first instructions with our JMP instruction. Hence the scan will have to continue to the next instruction or so, till we got at least 5 bytes.

So 5 bytes in x86 could contain from one instruction to 5 instructions (where each takes a single byte, obviously). Or even a single instruction whose size is longer than 5 bytes. (In x64 you might need 12-14 bytes for a whole-address-space JMP, and it only makes matter worse).

It is clear why we need to know the size of instructions, since we overwrite the first 5 bytes, we need to relocate them to another location, the trampoline. There we want to continue the execution of the original function we hooked and therefore we need to continue from the next instruction that we haven’t override. And it is not necessarily the instruction at offset 5… otherwise we might continue execution in the middle of an instruction, which is pretty bad.

Lame hooking engines don’t use disassemblers, they just have a predefined table of popular prologue instructions. Come a different compiled code, they won’t be able to hook a function. Anyway, we also need a disassembler for another reason, to tell whether we hit a dead end instruction, such as: RET, INT 3, JMP, etc. These are hooking spoilers, because if the first instruction of the target function is a simple RET (thus the function doesn’t do anything, leave aside cache side effects for now), or even a “return 0” function, which usually translates into “xor eax, eax; ret”, still takes only 3 bytes and we can’t plant a detour. So we find ourselves trying to override 5 bytes where the whole function takes several bytes (< 5 bytes), and we cannot override past that instruction since we don’t know what’s there. It might be another function’s entry point, data, NOP slide, or what not. The point is that we are not allowed to do that and eventually cannot hook the function, fail.

Another problem is relative-offset instructions. Suppose any of the first 5 bytes is a conditional branch instruction, we will have to relocate that instruction. Usually conditional branch instruction are only 2 bytes. And if we copy them to the trampoline, we will have to convert them into the longer variation which is 6 bytes and fix the offset. And that would work well. In x64, RIP-relative instructions are also pain in the butt, as well as any other relative-offset instruction which requires a fix. So there’s quiet a long list of those and a good hooking engine has to support them all, especially in x64 where there’s no standard prologue for a function.

I noticed a specific case where WaitForSingleObject is being compiled to:

XOR R8D, R8D

JMP short WaitForSingleObjectEx

in x64 of course; the xor takes 3 bytes and the jmp is a short one, which takes 2 bytes. And so you got 5 bytes total and should be able to hook it (it’s totally legal), but the hook engine I use sucked and didn’t allow that.

So you might say, ok, I got a generic solution for that, let’s follow the unconditional branch and hook that point. So I will hook WaitForSingleObjectEx instead, right? But now you got to the dreaded entry points problem. You might get called for a different entry point that you never meant to hook. You wanted to hook WaitForSingleObject and now you end up hooking WaitForSingleObjectEx, so all callers to WaitForSingleObject get to you, that’s true. In addition, now all callers to WaitForSingleObjectEx get to you too. That’s a big problem. And you can’t ever realize on whose behalf you were called (with a quick and legitimate solution).

The funny thing about the implementation of WaitForSingleObject is that it was followed immediately by an alignment NOP slide, which is never executed really, but the hooking engine can’t make a use of it, because it doesn’t know what we know. So unconditional branches screw up hooking engines if they show up before 5 bytes from the entry point, and we just saw that following the unconditional branch might screw us up as well with wrong context. So if you do that, it’s ill.

What would you do then in such cases? Cause I got some solutions, although nothing is perfect.