Monday, August 21, 2006

Now with all this noise surrounding the ConsumerReports article where they created 5500 new virus variants, I would really like to get my hands on their sample list to see how VxClass, our malware classification engine, deals with them.

Friday, August 11, 2006

Just to clarify: PaiMei is really good, the previous post was not supposed to be negative or detrimental -- it's definitely cool stuff.
From Matasano:

"The results of one trace can be used to filter subsequent traces. This is huge (in fairness: it’s something that other people, notably Halvar [I believe], have been working on)."

I have to admit that our flash movies that we posted last year in September are mind-numbingly boring, but they do show this sort of stuff ;) -- BinNavi was able to record commentable debug traces since day 1.

http://www.sabre-security.com/products/BinNavi/flash_binnavi_debugger.html
http://www.sabre-security.com/products/BinNavi/flash.html

The entire idea of breakpointing on everything and doing differential debugging dates back to at least a Blackhat presentation in Vegas 2002. Fun stuff, and good to see that with PaiMei there is finally a free framework to do this.

I really need to re-do the BinNavi movies in the next weeks, they really do not do our product any justice any more.

To continue shamelessly plugging my product :-):

"Can I have stack traces for each hit? I know they’re somewhat redundant, but I can graph them to visualize control flow (in particular, to identify event and “parse” loops)."

You can in the next release (scheduled for October) where you can attach arbitrary python scripts to breakpoints and thus do anything to memory you want.

"Symbols. Pedram acknowledges this in his presentation. It didn’t slow me down much not to have them, but it feels weird."

If IDA has them, BinNavi has them.

"I need to be able to click on a hit and see the assembly for it (if there’s a way to click on something and have it pop up in IDA, so much the better)."

Right-click->open subfunction in BinNavi ;)

"Yeah, I need this for non-Windows targets. Remote debugging is apparently coming, which will help. I don’t imagine Pedram’s working on SPARC support (X86 and Win32 has eaten its way pretty thoroughly through the code). Also,"

We have Linux/ptrace support and a (very experimental) WinCE/ARM support.

I promise to redo the movies in the next weeks.

Enough of the advertisement crap.

Cheers,
Halvar