Wednesday, November 18, 2020

The 2020 Volatility Plugin Contest results are in!

We would like to begin by thanking the participants for their hard work and contributions to Volatility. It’s always exciting to see continued innovation in the field of memory forensics from research teams across the globe! Despite the challenges of this unprecedented year, we had 8 submissions, including a number of new plugins, an output renderer, and a new graphical user interface. This year’s participants also had the additional challenge of learning all the new paradigms and interfaces of Volatility 3.

Independent open source projects and communities only remain viable because of contributors who are willing to sacrifice their time and resources. Please show your appreciation for the contestants’ contributions by following them on Twitter/GitHub/LinkedIn, providing feedback on their ideas, and helping to improve their code with testing, documentation, or contributing patches. 


We would like to thank Volexity for being a sustaining sponsor of the Volatility Foundation and, in particular, for contributing to this year’s contest. We would also like to thank Paessler AG for their donation toward the contest prizes!

Placements and Prizes for the 2020 Volatility Plugin Contest:

1st place and $2000 USD cash or One Free Seat at Malware and Memory Forensics Training by the Volatility Team goes to:

Gustavo Moreira for Netfilter  

2nd place and $1000 USD cash goes to:

Jelle Vergeer for SSHKeys 

3rd place and $750 USD cash goes to:

Aviel Zohar for Volatility Explorer, StructAnalyzer, WinObjGUI, FileScanGUI, P2V, PFNInfo, RAMMap, Winobj


Below is a detailed summary of all submissions, ordered alphabetically by first name. If you have feedback for the participants, we're sure they'd love to hear your thoughts! As previously mentioned, these developers deserve huge props. We look forward to seeing future work by these authors! 

Aviel Zohar: Volatility Explorer, StructAnalyzer, WinObjGUI, FileScanGUI, P2V, PFNInfo, RAMMap, Winobj

This contest submission includes a number of components intended to make Volatility more approachable and user-friendly to investigators. Volatility Explorer is a graphical user interface that provides a user experience similar to Sysinternal’s Process Explorer but only leveraging the information extracted from volatile memory. The Struct Analyzer plugin allows an analyst to parse memory resident data structures in a graphical hierarchy. WinObjGUI provides a capability to view kernel objects with a similar user experience provided by Sysinternal’s WinObj tool. FileScanGui allows an analyst to view files by providing a Window’s Explorer user interface experience. The submission also includes tools for mapping physical to virtual addresses, extracting the provenance of memory regions, and exploring forensics artifacts in physical memory: P2V and PFNInfo. The submission leverages these capabilities to create a tool that provides a similar user experience to Sysinternal’s RAMMap. Finally, the submission also includes an updated version of WinObj.

Related References:
https://github.com/memoryforensics1/Vol3xp
https://github.com/kslgroup/WinObj   
https://github.com/memoryforensics1/VolExp  
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7v1Owo0v5SYZ016VmVoVFV1elE/view  
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/process-explorer
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/rammap
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/winobj

Bjorn Stelte:  EvtxLogs Plugin

This submission provides the capability to extract evtx entries from physical memory of Windows systems. The EvtxLogs plugin leverages the work done by Willi Ballenthin's python-evtx/evtxtract libraries. By focusing on memory samples, it allows a forensics analyst to get insights into events that were happening at the time of acquisition, and events that happened in the past on the suspected system. In particular, this can augment the data used for temporal reconstruction of system events. 

Related References:
https://scholarworks.uno.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3206&context=td
https://github.com/volatilityfoundation/volatility/pull/252/files 
ttps://github.com/williballenthin/EVTXtracthttps://github.com/williballenthin/python-evtx   

Bjorn Stelte:  Syslog Renderer

This submission involved a Volatility 3 renderer for sending Volatility output to a syslog server. The syslog output renderer is intended for situations where a forensics analyst is attempting to analyze a large number of memory samples. An analyst could integrate Volatility into an automated pipeline and send the results to a unified syslog server. Then, the analyst could access the server to triage, using strings and other analysis methods which systems need deeper forensic analysis.

Related References:
https://volatility3.readthedocs.io/en/latest/basics.html#output-renderers

Gustavo Moreira: MountInfo Plugin 

The use of containers has seen significant growth in production Linux environments. Previous Volatility file system analysis capabilities did not fully enumerate information related to containers, which left much work on part of the analyst. This plugin closes that gap by replicating the per-process mount information as exported in the /proc/<pid>/mountinfo file on live systems.

Related References:
https://github.com/volatilityfoundation/volatility/wiki/Linux-Command-Reference#linux_mount

Gustavo Moreira: Netfilter Plugin

This plugin provides full support for the enumeration of Netfilter hooks for all modern versions of the Linux kernel. The Netfilter subsystem is routinely abused by kernel rootkits to control the network stack, such as the recently disclosed Drovorub and Cloud Snooper malware samples. Abusing Netfilter hooks provides a rootkit with the ability to monitor for 'magic packets' containing command-and-control data; sniff outgoing and incoming network connections; and even silently modify packet data. Properly implemented rootkits will also abuse Netfilter to hide malicious traffic from userland network monitors, such as tcpdump and Wireshark, running on the local system.

Related References:
https://github.com/volatilityfoundation/volatility/pull/577
https://media.defense.gov/2020/Aug/13/2002476465/-1/-1/0/CSA_DROVORUB_RUSSIAN_GRU_MALWARE_AUG_2020.PDF 

Jelle Vergeer: SSHKeys Plugin

This submission implemented a Volatility 3 plugin to extract SSH session keys, which are used to encrypt and decrypt network traffic between an SSH client and server. The plugin can extract keys from Linux OpenSSH ssh (client) and sshd (server) processes by locating and parsing a structure that holds the symmetric key cipher name, the keys used for encryption/decryption, and the initialization vectors (IVs) used for encryption/decryption. For each SSH session, two key/IV pairs are recovered, client to server and server to client.  Given the output of the author's Volatility plugin (a JSON containing key and IV) and a PCAP of the network traffic between SSH client and server, users can decrypt and parse the network traffic using another tool the author developed, dissect.network. The result is complete transparency into the entire SSH network session.

Related References:
https://blog.fox-it.com/2020/11/11/decrypting-openssh-sessions-for-fun-and-profit/
https://github.com/fox-it/OpenSSH-Session-Key-Recovery/tree/main/volatility2
https://github.com/fox-it/OpenSSH-Session-Key-Recovery/tree/main/volatility3
https://github.com/fox-it/OpenSSH-Network-Parser
https://github.com/fox-it/OpenSSH-Session-Key-Recovery/tree/main/pip-package
https://twitter.com/jelleverg

Or Chechik and Inon Weber: check_parent_spoof Plugin

This submission provides a practical method to detect stealth techniques used by malware in the wild and post-exploitation toolkits, such as Cobalt Strike. Although there are ways to identify parent process spoofing on live machines using ETW and via dead disk forensics by parsing event logs, the check_parent_spoof plugin for Volatility 3 adds this capability to memory analysis. In many cases, after creating a child process with a spoofed parent, code is injected into the child, which warrants analyzing memory anyway. The ability to triage all of these aspects with a single source of evidence provides a powerful capability.

Related References:
https://github.com/orchechik/check_spoof
https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1134/004/
https://github.com/countercept/ppid-spoofing/blob/master/PPID-Spoof.ps1
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OmFPXRX-u-xfOkJMskSq-y1Wpc4Y3nyK/view?usp=sharing
https://twitter.com/orchechik
https://twitter.com/InonWeber

Or Chechik and Inon Weber: check_peb_spoof Plugin

In addition to parent process spoofing, another common obfuscation technique is PEB-Spoofing or PEB-Masquerading, which provides a mechanism for bypassing UAC. This plugin provides the ability to detect spoofed process names and detect malware using this technique. This is accomplished by comparing the name in the PEB with the name from the EPROCESS kernel structure. 

Related References:
  
Here are a few additional resources for previous contests and community-driven plugins:

Volatility Foundation Contest Home Page: http://www.volatilityfoundation.org/contest

Volatility 2019 Plugin Contest Results: https://www.volatilityfoundation.org/2019
Volatility 2018 Plugin Contest Results: https://www.volatilityfoundation.org/2018
Volatility 2017 Plugin Contest Results: http://www.volatilityfoundation.org/2017
Volatility 2016 Plugin Contest Results: http://www.volatilityfoundation.org/2016 
Volatility 2015 Plugin Contest Results: http://www.volatilityfoundation.org/2015
Volatility 2014 Plugin Contest Results: http://www.volatilityfoundation.org/2014-cjpn
Volatility 2013 Plugin Contest Results: http://www.volatilityfoundation.org/2013-c19yz

Volatility Community GitHub Repository: https://github.com/volatilityfoundation/community 

 

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