BluePill: Neutralizing Anti-Analysis Behavior in Malware Dissection

Blue Pill is a dynamic analysis framework for malware that uses observe, check, and replace paradigm to intercept potentially evasive queries and replace them with values that meet the sample's expectations. It aims to achieve transparency with an active approach and provide features to hide artifacts of third-party monitoring tools, apply code edits, and make the system extensible and customizable.

• Blue Pill is a dynamic analysis framework for malware
• It uses observe, check, and replace paradigm to intercept potentially evasive queries and replace them with values that meet the sample's expectations
• It aims to achieve transparency with an active approach
• It provides features to hide artifacts of third-party monitoring tools, apply code edits, and make the system extensible and customizable

Blue Pill is a tool that helps malware analysts in their daily life. It allows them to intercept potentially evasive queries and replace them with values that meet the sample's expectations. This helps to achieve transparency with an active approach and provides features to hide artifacts of third-party monitoring tools, apply code edits, and make the system extensible and customizable. Blue Pill uses dynamic panel instrumentation and EBI to implement a full-fledged malware analysis system. It is easy to use and extend, and it hides the code that performs the analysis from the code that gets analyzed. Blue Pill is a powerful tool that can help malware analysts to detect and analyze malware more effectively.

In the malware realm designing transparent sandboxes is only one part of the story. When analysts intervene to understand structure and functional capabilities of complex samples, a good deal of their time is wasted in disarming piles of anti-analysis techniques.To neutralize a slew of new and old tricks in this talk, I present BluePill, a dynamic analysis framework that fools a sample into believing it is executing loosely while being instead under the scalpel of an analyst. Unlike recent proposals, BluePill can operate alongside classic tools from an analyst's arsenal, hiding their presence to the sample.BluePill hooks evasive queries and adversarial sequences (like environment fingerprinting attempts and anti-debugging patterns) altering what the sample sees of the system. It also fast-forwards time to address time-based evasions and stalling strategies. Analysts can debug a sample via GDB remote protocol and benefit from a new technique that hides performed code edits from anti-tampering schemes. Finally, BluePill offers taint tracking capabilities useful to dissect behaviors such as evasions.Designed around analysts, BluePill lets them customize its hooks and add new ones using insight from the dissection, which is especially useful for targeted malware and new tricks. Also, it is immune from semantic gaps. In this talk, I will show how BluePill can defeat tricks from recent evasive samples and executable protectors, making it possible to dissect them on a standard VirtualBox installation alongside classic analysis tools.