Game-Changing Advances in Windows Shellcode Analysis

Shellcode is omnipresent, seen or unseen. Yet tooling to analyze shellcode is lacking. We present the cutting-edge SHAREM framework to analyze enigmatic shellcode. SHAREM can emulate shellcode, identifying 20,000 WinAPI functions and 99% of Windows syscalls. In some shellcode, some APIs may never be reached, due to the wrong environment, but SHAREM has a new solution: Complete code coverage preserves the CPU register context and memory at each change in control flow. Once the shellcode ends, it restarts, restoring memory and context, ensuring all functionality is reached and identifying all APIs. Encoded shellcode may be puzzling at times. SHAREM is a game-changer, as it presents emulated shellcode in its decoded form in a disassembler. IDA Pro and Ghidra can produce disassembly of shellcode that is of poor quality. However, SHAREM uniquely can ingest emulation data, resulting in virtually flawless disassembly. While SHAREM has its own custom disassembler, we are also releasing a Ghidra plugin, so SHAREM's enhanced disassembly can enhance what is in GHidra. Only SHAREM identifies APIs in disassembly, and this also can be brought to Ghidra. We will also see how SHAREM can be used by aspiring shellcode authors to enhance their own work, and we will examine advanced shellcode specimens in SHAREM. | Dr. Bramwell Brizendine completed his Ph.D. in Cyber Operations, for which he did his dissertation on Jump-Oriented Programming, a hitherto seldom-studied and poorly understood subset of code-reuse attacks.