where do stealthkit detectors belong

mike rothman brought up an interesting point today in a section of his daily incite - where does stealthkit (rootkit to those of you drinking the revisionist rootkit koolaid) belong? inside a larger security application suite (or perhaps a larger security application period) or on it's own as a separate tool? although they're often separate right now, mike thinks they probably shouldn't be...

but given how they operate and how best the fundamental technique they employ can be used, is merging them into larger products really reasonable?

most stealthkit detectors employ a generic detection technique known as a cross-view diff or cross-view analysis where essentially you look at some area of the computer in 2 or more different ways and see if there are any discrepancies between them... although most stealthkit detectors are trying to cut this particular corner, outside-the-box analysis is ultimately necessary to truly see through persistent stealthed malware... the av industry knew this back in the 90's (it was called clean booting back then, though microsoft has since recycled that term) but got microsoft's boot up their ass when NTFS became mainstream without any robust method to perform outside-the-box analysis on that type of file system so they've been squeaking by with safe-mode ever since... anti-spyware and other anti-malware apps that grew up in the interim have never even dealt with this methodology because active stealth went out of fashion for a number of years but for an anti-malware that deals specifically with stealth in a generic sort of way at least part of it's operation really should be done outside-the-box and that is going to set it apart from other anti-malware functionality...

as yet the only detector i know of that does an outside-the-box cross-view diff is the WinPE implementation of microsoft's strider ghostbuster rootkit detection technology but that's still just a research project... no one else does it because as yet microsoft have not made WinPE easily available to the public (though i've heard rumors this may change with vista) and the alternative, BartPE, must be generated by the user (due to copyright and licensing restrictions from microsoft) rather than distributed with the stealthkit detector, which is a not-so-simple task from the perspective of average-joe computer users...

but if the anti-stealthkit folks were to do things right, how well would the resulting product (that runs off a bootable cd) fit in with existing security apps? not very well would be my guess... it would be nice if anti-virus and other anti-malware apps could operate in a similar outside-the-box environment since stealth is just a means to hide what eventually becomes known-malware, but that defies centralized management consoles and scheduled scans and a variety of other convenience features (bloat) that they've accumulated over the years... outside-the-box is fundamentally at odds with convenience but it's necessary for reliable generic detection of stealthed objects so how can you reconcile stealth malware detection with the increasingly convenient unified anti-malware product?

microsoft says escape from wet paper bag becoming impossible

holy crap, have you heard the news? microsoft has proclaimed that it's becoming impossible to recover from malware..

yeah, of course you've heard the news... everyone and their grandmother seems to think it's a big deal that microsoft is saying security is too hard...

microsoft is basically citing windows rootkits, advanced spyware, and anything else that might hook the kernal as the reason why recovery from malware is going to supposedly become impossible... in the malware world those things all boil down to stealth techniques, and as i've already said - we solved the stealth problem over a decade ago... microsoft, being deaf, blind, and monumentally stupid, made that solution basically unusable by foisting NTFS on us without giving us a solution for booting from a known clean removable medium and parsing NTFS partitions (before NTFS we could just boot from a write protected, bootable floppy disk and access the drive from DOS without triggering any malware self-defense mechanisms and without allowing the malware's stealth capabilities to be activated)...

the really weird thing is that microsoft does have the technology... it's called a PE (Preinstalled Environment) disk and not only does microsoft not want to give it away for free or bundle it with the operating system to aid in maintenance and disaster recovery, but they actually got on the case of the maker(s) of the BartPE disk (a free alternative to microsoft's own PE disk) a couple years ago, forcing the product temporarily offline...

lots of folks are taking microsoft's proclaimation seriously - don't buy into their cop-out... the handful of years they've spent trying to catch up in the security field are apparently just not enough for them to realize they have the solution in their own grubby little hands... the malware problem is not as bad as those morons in redmond make it out to be...

why virtual machine based 'rootkits' won't be the next big problem

ok, ignoring the issue of what rootkits really are for the moment, let's examine this idea of rootkits that are so low level they're even below the OS...

first, as greg hoglund points out you're pretty much guaranteed to notice the performance hit when your entire OS gets dropped into a virtual machine...

second, as pointed out on the f-secure blog it's actually been done before over a decade ago, back when stealth was still called stealth...

but really, i think i'm going to go them both one better (at least) and say that we solved the full stealth problem over a decade ago... that solution was called booting from a known clean bootable floppy disk and scanning with a known virus scanner...

"but kurt, how are we supposed to use our generic rootkit detection technology if the rootkit isn't active?" - simple, you aren't... those sorts of generics require the malware to be active, which gives it a tactical advantage (it's able to actively defend itself then)... it also allows the malware to know more about the security application than the security application knows about the malware, which is another tactical advantage for the malware... if you're unfamiliar with what sun tsu had to say about engaging the enemy when you're at a disadvantage then i suggest you go do your homework right now... you can't rely solely on generics that way - known-malware techniques (know your enemy) must be employed in an environment and under conditions of your choosing in order to maximize your tactical advantage, and the generics are then used in a supporting role to partially cover what that strategy can't...

now, those of you who've been following things for a few years now you probably know that microsoft screwed that option up with the advent of NTFS... no version of MSDOS is capable of parsing an NTFS partition natively and microsoft seems unwilling to do much about that - probably because so far there really hasn't been that great a need these days... however, should the need arise a fair amount of effort has gone into correcting microsoft's oversight... things like bart's pe disk, NTFS4DOS, or any one of the many recovery oriented live-cd linux distributions can give you access to an NTFS partition after booting from a known clean bootable medium...

all in all, the majority of what's being said out there about microsoft's subvirt and the technology it represents is just hype... in the very unlikely event that anyone ever actually bothers trying to deploy it in the wild, it's an old problem that we've had a solution for for some time now...

[obligatory terminology rant]
of course all of this is one of the consequences of the rootkit redefinition... it clouds the issues in both the rootkit problem-space and the stealth problem-space... we wouldn't be forgetting this history if stealth was still called stealth, and then maybe the brain-trust at microsoft wouldn't have to spend untold millions reinventing the wheel that we already know how to deal with...
[/obligatory terminology rant]