Understanding PE Parsing for Reverse Engineers Part 4 - Data Directory and Exports
🕑 Added 2023-05-24 23:52:21 +0000 UTCThis is the final tutorial in our four-part series on PE parsing from a reverse engineering perspective. In this tutorial we explore parsing the PE export table. We conclude the tutorial with a complete PEB walk example parsing the exports from NTDLL.
Code References
The following are links to the code that was used in the tutorial. These are handy to keep as references as they have the structures and patterns that can be used in IDA when marking up pseudocode.
Further Reading
- PE file diagram from Corkami
- An In-Depth Look into the Win32 Portable Executable File Format (Inside Windows)
- An In-Depth Look into the Win32 Portable Executable File Format Part 2 (Inside Windows)
- Example PE parsing from iredteam
- VERGILIUS
- GetModuleHandle translation to base address (Stack Overflow)
- _IMAGE_DATA_DIRECTORY
- Export Hashing ( in4k )
- Zeus PE Walk 2010
- Original PEB Walk
- Export Parsing Example (TitanHide)
- Forwarded Export
Hands-On Example
Attached to this post is the compiled example from the tutorial (64-bit) and a 32-bit version of the same example. See if you can replicate the pseudocode markup from the tutorial with both samples.
Comments
OALABS
Only 20 lines of code away from knowing the answer!!
anests1a
I can perform the approach with Proccess Injection and create a child that inherits Virtual Address Descriptor and do the PE parsing with NtQueryVirtualMemory and then detect the memory pages with IMAGE_NT_HEADERS* ntHeaders = (IMAGE_NT_HEADERS*)(pAddress + dosHeader->e_lfanew); if (ntHeaders->SIGNATURE != IMAGE_NT_SIGNATURE) and achieve the same? I mean it would be more complicated but can it be done? If I read a valid Signature I can go through its EXPORT_DIRECTORY to see if it matches any hashing and know that I am inside the dll I want.
성일 배
I don't understand. Could you explain more?
June
Took me a while to figure out why there would be a "." 10 bytes into ntdll, kind of surprised there's not a way to make it show that it's the 6th character
m4n0w4r
For more complete content, I think you should do the Part 5 - Data Directory and Relocation