Introduction

This project aims to give a simple overview on how good various x64 hooking engines (on windows) are. I’ll try to write various functions, that are hard to patch and then see how each hooking engine does.

I’ll test:

• EasyHook
• PolyHook
• MinHook
• Mhook

(I’d like to test detours, but I’m not willing to pay for it. So that isn’t tested :( )

There are multiple things that make hooking difficult. Maybe you want to patch while the application is running -- in that case you might get race conditions, as the application is executing your half finished hook. Maybe the software has some self protection features (or other software on the system provides that, e.g. Trustee Rapport)

Evaluating how the hooking engines stack up against that is not the goal here. Neither are non-functional criteria, like how fast it is or how much memory it needs for each hook. This is just about the challenges the function to be hooked itself poses.

Namely:

• Are jumps relocated?
• What about RIP adressing?
• If there’s a loop at the beginning / if it’s a tail recurisve function, does the hooking engine handle it?
• How good is the dissassembler, how many instructions does it know?
• Can it hook already hooked functions?

At first I will give a short walk through of the architecture, then quickly go over the test cases. After that come the results and an evaluation for each engine.

I think I found a flaw in all of them; I’ll publish a small POC which should at least detect the existence of problematic code.

A word of caution: my results are worse than expected, so do assume I have made a mistake in using the libraries. I went into this expecting that some engines at least would try to detect e.g. the loops back into the first few bytes. But none did? That’s gotta be wrong.

Another word of caution: parts of this are rushed and/or ugly. Please double check parts that seem suspicious. And I’d love to get patches, even for the most trivial things -- spelling mistakes? Yes please.

Architecture

This project is made up of two parts. A .DLL with the test cases and an .exe that hooks those, tests whether they still work and prints the results.

(I could have done it all in the .exe but this makes it trivial to (at some point) force the function to be hooked and the target function to be further apart than 2GB. Just set fixed image bases in the project settings and you’re done)

My main concern was automatically identifying whether the hook worked. I consider a hook to work if: a) the original function can still execute successfully and b) the hook was called.

The criteria a) is really similar to a unit test. Verify that a function returns what is expected. So for a) the .exe just runs unit tests after all the hooks have been applied. Each failing function is reported (or the program crashes and I can look at the callstack) so I can correlate that with which hooking engine I’m currently testing and see where those fail. I’ve used Catch2 for the unit tests, because I wanted to try it anyway.

From the get-to it was clear that I wanted to test multiple hooking engines. And they all needed to do the same steps in the same order -- so I implemented a basic AbstractHookingEngine with a boolean for every test case and make a child class for each engine. The children classes have to overwrite hook_all and unhook_all. Inbetween the calls to that, the unit tests run.

Test case: Small

This is just a very small function; it is smaller than the hook code will be - so how does the library react?

_small:
	xor eax, eax
	ret

Test case: Branch

Instead of the FASM code I’ll show the disassembled version, so you can see the instruction lengths & offsets.

0026 | 48 83 E0 01 | and rax,1
002A | 74 17       | je test_cases.0043 --+
002C | 48 31 C0    | xor rax,rax          |
002F | 90          | nop                  |
0030 | 90          | nop                  |
...                                       |
0041 | 90          | nop                  |
0042 | 90          | nop                  |
0043 | C3          | ret <----------------+

This function has a branch in the first 5 bytes. Hooking it detour-style isn’t possible without fixing that branch in the trampoline. The NOP sled is just so the hooking engine can’t cheat and just put the whole function into the trampoline. Instead the jump in the trampoline needs to be modified so it jumps back to the original destinations

Test case: RIP relative

One of the new things in AMD64 is RIP relative addressing. I guess the reason to include it was to make it easier to generate PIC -- all references to data can now be made relative, instead of absolute. So it doesn’t matter anymore where the program is loaded into memory and there’s less need for the relocation table.

A quick and dirty[1] test for this is re-implementing the well known C rand function.

public _rip_relative
_rip_relative:
	mov rax, qword[seed]
	mov ecx, 214013
	mul ecx
	add eax, 2531011
	mov [seed], eax

	shr eax, 16
	and eax, 0x7FFF
	ret

seed dd 1

The very first instruction uses rip relative addressing, thus it needs to be fixed in the trampoline.

Test case: AVX & RDRAND

The AMD64 instruction set is extended with every CPU generation. Becayse the hooking engines need to know the instruction lengths and their side effects to properly apply their hooks, they need to keep up.

The actual code in the test case is boring and doesn’t matter. I’m sure there are disagreements on whether I’ve picked good candidates of “exotic” or new instructions, but those were the first that came to mind.

(It’s also doubtful whether you’ll ever encounter functions where the first instructions are of this category, because most probably there’s some setup needed before, e.g. checking that adresses are aligned, initalizing loop counters, yadda, yadda)

Test case: loop and TailRec

My hypothesis before starting this evaluation was that those two cases would make most hooking engines fail. Back in the good ol’ days of x86 detour hooking didn’t require any special thought because the prologue was exactly as big as the hook itself -- 5 bytes for PUSH ESP; MOV EBP, ESP and 5 bytes for JMP +- 2GB[2]. That isn’t so easy for AMD64: a) the hook sometimes needs to be way bigger b) due to changes in the calling convention and the general architecture of AMD64 there just isn’t a common prologue, used for almost all functions, anymore.

Those by itself arn’t a problem, since the hooking engines can fix all the instructions they would overwrite. However I hypothesized that only a few would check whether the function contained a loop that jumps back into the instructions that have been overwritten. Consider this:

public _loop
_loop:
	mov rax, rcx
@loop_loop:
	mul rcx
	nop
	nop
	nop
	loop @loop_loop ; lol
	ret

There’s only 3 bytes that can be safely overwritten. Right after that is the destination of the jump backwards. This is a very simple (and kinda pointless) function so detecting that the loop might lead to problems shouldn’t be a problem. But consider what happens with MHook (and all the others):

_loop original:

008C | 48 89 C8                 | mov rax,rcx
008F | 48 F7 E1                 | mul rcx
0092 | 90                       | nop
0093 | 90                       | nop
0094 | 90                       | nop
0095 | E2 F8                    | loop test_cases.008F
0097 | C3                       | ret

_loop hooked:

008C | E9 0F 69 23 00           | jmp <MHook_Hooks::hookLoop>
0091 | E1 90                    | loope test_cases.0023
0093 | 90                       | nop
0094 | 90                       | nop
0095 | E2 F8                    | loop test_cases.008F
0097 | C3                       | ret

trampoline:

00007FFF7CD200C0 | 48 89 C8                 | mov rax,rcx
00007FFF7CD200C3 | 48 F7 E1                 | mul rcx
00007FFF7CD200C6 | E9 C7 96 DC FF           | jmp test_cases.0092

then executes:

0092 | 90                       | nop
0093 | 90                       | nop
0094 | 90                       | nop
0095 | E2 F8                    | loop test_cases.008F

But that jumps back into the middle of the jump and thus executes:

008F | 23 00                    | and eax,dword ptr ds:[rax]
0091 | E1 90                    | loope test_cases.0023

Which isn’t right and will crash horribly.

(Preliminary) Results

+----------+-----+------+------------+---+------+----+-------+
|      Name|Small|Branch|RIP Relative|AVX|RDRAND|Loop|TailRec|
+----------+-----+------+------------+---+------+----+-------+
|  PolyHook|  X  |   X  |      X     | X |      |    |       |
|   MinHook|  X  |   X  |      X     |   |      |    |   X   |
|     MHook|     |      |      X     |   |      |    |       |
+----------+-----+------+------------+---+------+----+-------+

As expected nothing could correctly hook the loop. In fact I had to comment out those parts because even Catch2 couldn’t recover from the crashes generated by the botched hooks. Some hooking engines are a bit lacking in their support for newer instruction sets, but a simple update of the dissassembler library should fix that.

I was pleasantly suprised by MinHook, both the general AIP and because it managed to build a trampoline that worked perfectly even for the tail recursion case. I’d recommend it, even though it seems theres no chance that the dissassembler will ever be updated.

Detecting tail recursive functions / loops into overwritten code

Back in 2015 I wanted to write my own hooking engine which would be able to hook ALL THE FUNCTIONS! And I did actually start to write it and then abandoded it, before I got to the interesting part. However since then I had the basic idea down:

1) Find out how long the function is 2) Analyze it, by checking whether some jump could jump into the overwritten instructions 3) Somehow fix that

Fixing that code probably means putting the whole function in the trampoline, by definition there is no space where to put the additional/longer instructions.

However I think that hooking engines should at least fail fast if they can’t hook that function and give the user the ability to handle that error at that stage instead of waiting for unpredictable crashes. I’ll post example code here and outline the general technique below.

(My x64hook hooking engine doesn’t work. There’s literally two interesting functions in it, and I give pseudocode for them below)

Estimate the length of a function

Note: This is an estimation of the function length. There’s various ways to go about to do it, one way would be to search pro- and epilogue. Which would fail for all functions that -- for whatever reason -- don’t have that. I’m sure this way also isn’t perfect, but maybe it could be used as another source of information[5].

Over the years I’ve seen various attempts at estimating the function length. One of the top hits for my google history is a question on stackoverflow which[3] uses the same technique that I’ve seen in various malware strains - checking byte for byte until the RET opcode is found. Which won’t work if either:

1) The RET imm16 opcode is used, which is often the case for __stdcall funcs. 2) There are multiple returns 3) The function doesn’t actually return with the RET instruction. For example if a function A at its end calls another function B, with A and B sharing the same parameters and either A or B not modifying the stack pointer it is perfectly possible to just jump to function B. Exectution will continue in B, which ends with a normal RET. 4) The value 0xC3 appears for some other reason in the function.

4) can be easily solved by using a length disassember engine and just checking the actual instruction byte. 1) and 3) aren’t that hard either, you’ll just need to check for some additional opcodes. What about 2)?

The key insight I had was why a function might have multiple returns -- because it needed to do additional work in some cases. Which meant that there had to be branching, to sometimes skip some instructions or get to them.

If there is a branch backwards it’s a loop. But a branch forwards means that the function extends at least up to there[4]. Or in pseudocode:

offsetOfInstr = 0
funcLen = 0
furthestJump = 0
while(can dissasemble next instruction)
{
	offsetOfInstr += funcLen;


	op = getOpcode(instruction);
	if(is_jump(op))
	{
		off = get_jump_offset(instruction);
		if(off > furthestJump)
			furthestJump = off;
	}

	if(is_end_of_function(op, furthestJump, offsetOfInstr))
	{
		break;
	}
}

bool is_end_of_function(opc, furthestJump, instrOffset)
{
	if(opc == RET && furthestJump <= instrOffset)
		return true;
	else if(opc == UD_Ijmp)
	{
		if(destination is IMM || destination is register)
			return true;
	}

	return false;
}

Detecting loops to the start of a function

firstJumpOffset = MAX_INT
foreach(instruction in function)
	if(instruction is a jump)
		jumpOffset = getOffset(instruction) // relative to function start

		/* jumps to exactly the start of a function are fine, since that is
		where our overwritten code starts. Thus it doesn't jump into the middle
		of an instruction */
		if(jumpOffset == 0)
			continue

		if(jumpOffset < firstJumpOffset)
			firstJumpOffset = jumpOffset;

return firstJumpOffset < lengthNeededForHook

---

[1] This is one of the things that could easily be improved, but haven’t been because I just couldn’t motivate myself. Putting the data right after the func meant that a section containing code needed to be writable. Which is bad. Also I load the seed DWORD as a QWORD -- which only works because the upper half is then thrown away by the multiplication. It’s shitty code is what I’m saying.

In retrospect I should have used a jump table like a switch-case could be compiled into. That would be read only data. Oh well.

[2] And Microsoft decided at some point to make it even easier for their code with the advent of hotpatching.

[3] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8705215/get-the-size-length-of-a-c-function

[4] With some caveats, e.g. one could assume that no function is longer than 512 bytes. And obviously keeping in mind point 3

[5] Another heuristic would be to check for the next slide of filler instructions, such as INT3 or NOP. Some compilers align functions on 16byte boundarys and fill the gaps with those