wxsBSD

Note

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Introduction

I recently put YARA inside osquery and thought I would provide some details on how to use it. There are two YARA related tables in osquery, which serve very different purposes. The first table, called yara_events, uses osquery's pub-sub framework to monitor for filesystem changes and will execute YARA when a file change event fires. The second table, called yara, is an on-demand YARA scanning table.

Configuration

wxsBSD

I was recently asked how to check the entropy of a given section in YARA, and because the person who asked is clearly looking to learn how to fish instead of just being given fish I went into some detail on the explanation. With his permission I am sharing my response here.

It's a combination of a number of things:

math.in_range(test, lower, upper):

Given a test value, check to see if it is in range of the lower and upper bounds. This is an inclusive test.

math.entropy(offset, length):

wxsBSD

Here's what I was thinking of doing...

{
  // Description of the YARA rules to use. Each key is a group name used in additional_monitoring
  // or in scheduled_queries if you want.
  "yara": {
    "sig_group_1": [ "foo.sig", "bar.sig" ],
    "sig_group_2": [ "baz.sig" ]
  },

wxsBSD

Problems with pehash implementations

I've started to add a pehash implementation to YARA. I decided to base my implementation on the description in the paper and only use the totalhash and viper implementations for comparing results. In doing so I've noticed some problems, and it is unclear who is right.

Totalhash implementation

For starters let's take a look at running the pehash.py implementation from totalhash against a binary.

wxs@psh Desktop % shasum 4180ee367740c271e05b3637ee64619fb9fe7b1d2b28866e590e731b9f81de36

wxsBSD

Someone recently asked me if it is possible to test if a string is in a section or not in YARA. This is my attempt at an answer, and please note that some of the capabilities are still pending a merge to master.

// Make sure the string is in the .rsrc section.
rule test_in {
  strings:
    $a = { DE AD BE EF 00 00 DE AD BE EF }
  condition:
    $a in ((pe.sections[pe.section_index(".rsrc")].raw_data_offset)..(pe.sections[pe.section_index(".rsrc")].raw_data_offset + pe.sections[pe.section_index(".rsrc")].raw_data_size))
}

wxsBSD

Introduction

I'd like to explain some of the new things I've added to YARA which will be in the next release. This is in addition to the stuff I've written about here, which are already in 3.2.0. If you have not read that I suggest you start there as it will tie in nicely with some of the things I'm going to mention here. Lastly, some of these things are not yet merged into master but I expect them to be very soon.

Math Module

There is a new module in YARA called math. The intention of this module is to expose some functions which you can use in your rules to calculate specific properties.

Functions

In particular it provides these functions for calculating different values:

• entropy

wxsBSD

With the release of YARA 3.2.0 I wanted to show people how to utilize some of the new features. In particular I'll show an example for rich_signatures, import hashing and Authenticode signatures.

You'll need both of these for obvious reasons. :)

import "pe"
import "hash"