Malware monitor – leveraging PyREBox for malware analysis

This post was authored by Xabier Ugarte Pedrero

In July 2017 we released PyREBox, a Python Scriptable Reverse Engineering Sandbox as an open source tool. This project is part of our continuous effort to create new tools to improve our workflows. PyREBox is a versatile instrumentation framework based on QEMU.

It allows us to run a whole operating system in a virtual environment (emulator), and to inspect and modify its memory and registers at run-time. A small set of QEMU modifications allows users to instrument certain events such as instruction execution or memory read/writes.

On top of this, PyREBox leverages Virtual Machine Introspection techniques to bridge the semantic gap, that is, understanding OS abstractions such as processes, threads, or libraries. You can find the more detailed description of the framework as well as its capabilities in the original blogpost.

In the past few months we have received positive feedback from the community, fixed bugs and added features suggested by the users. We also added support for GNU/Linux guests, and implemented an agent (program run inside the emulated guest) that allows file transfer between a host and a guest, as well as execution of samples in the guest on demand.

As part of this ongoing effort, today we are releasing a set of PyREBox scripts that are designed to aid malware analysis: Malware monitor. These scripts automate different tasks, such as code coverage analysis, API tracing, memory monitoring, and process memory dumping.

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