by ReWolf

Reverse engineering Mortal Kombat GRA file format (part 2)

Disclaimer: This post is aimed at retro-gaming preservation and code-archeology. All product names, trademarks, and registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

933 days, this is the amount of time that passed since part 1 of that blog post. I had almost all work done back in 2018, I was just missing one small detail about the palette applied to the rendered frames. Then life happened and I pretty much abandoned not only this blog but all of my side projects. Around the beginning of February  2021, I felt a sudden urge to finish that project and I dug up all of my notes and source codes and started moving forward. The sources, obviously,  didn’t meet my quality bar after all these years, but I took the time to modernize them a bit, so it is less of a shame to make them public.

Before I start, I encourage old and new readers to take a look at part 1, as this post is a continuation and it may be easier to follow along being familiar with the prior research.

One more thing that is worth mentioning that I didn’t know in 2018 is that MK1 and MK2 executables have embedded Watcom compiler symbols. I learned about it just recently when I was looking for some recent development with regard to MK reverse engineering efforts:

I didn’t use the wcdctool as the list of steps to make it work is quite long and I have most of the executable described in IDA anyway. The most important learning I took from wcdctool is the existence of wdump utility (Open Watcom Executable Image Dump Utility) that can dump all available symbols. I used that tool to apply original functions/symbols names in IDA (on top of my own naming), so I may sometimes refer to those original names, provided they are better than the one I came up with.

Continue reading →

by ReWolf

Reverse engineering Mortal Kombat GRA file format (part 1)

Disclaimer: This post is aimed at retro-gaming preservation and code-archeology. All product names, trademarks and registered trademarks are property of their respective owners.

GRA files are used by the PC DOS version of Mortal Kombat 1 and 2 (available on GOG) to store all kinds of graphics. There are two different types of GRA files:

  • compressed static images or animations – this is a well-defined self-contained file format that can be easily converted to the PNG/APNG/GIF, the only obstacle is compression which has to be reverse-engineered first. I’ll refer to it as cGRA and cover that format today.
  • not compressed sprites/fonts/graphic objects/UI elements – this format is kind of a mess, it just contains encoded pixel data without any metadata. All necessary information has to be scavenged from the Mortal Kombat executable (sprites offsets, width, height, palette). I’ll refer to it as uGRA and cover that format in part 2 of this blog post (still have to figure out a few things).

Continue reading →

by ReWolf

PCAUSA Rawether for Windows local privilege escalation

Rawether for Windows is a framework that facilitates communication between an application and the NDIS miniport driver. It’s produced by a company named Printing Communications Assoc., Inc. (PCAUSA), which seems to be no longer operating. Company websites can be still reached through web.archive.org:

http://web.archive.org/web/20151017034756/http://www.pcausa.com/
http://web.archive.org/web/20151128171809/http://www.rawether.net/

Rawether framework provides NDIS Protocol Driver similar to the NPF.SYS (part of the WinPcap). This framework is used by many different hardware vendors in their WiFi and router control applications. Exploit attached to this advisory targets 64bit version of PcaSp60.sys driver which is part of ASUS PCE-AC56 WLAN Card Utilities.

Identifying other affected vendors is quite problematic, since Rawether is just a framework it is possible that the driver name, device name or driver version info were changed. Additionally, verifying if the particular software is really vulnerable is sometimes not feasible, because installation package won’t install without specific hardware.

Continue reading →

by ReWolf

GoGoGadget – kernel exploitation helper class

The aim of this class is to facilitate building kernel shell-codes and ROP chains (at least before RFG kicks in sometime next year) by providing easy access to some of the available kernel information leaks. Under the hood I am using well known NtQuerySystemInformation with following classes: SystemExtendedHandleInformation, SystemModuleInformation. This piece of code came to live as a part of an exploit that I was developing some time ago, but I can’t release it yet. Therefore I decided to publish it as a separate project, so everyone (or just future me) can reuse it for their own purposes. Code is written in C++ and should compile with Visual Studio 2015, for now it only supports x64 platform and some of the functionality is limited to Windows 10 (obtaining EPROCESS address of some of the system processes). I advise compiling Release build, since Debug is very slow due to extensive use of STL

GitHub: https://github.com/rwfpl/rewolf-gogogadget

Continue reading →

by ReWolf

Leaking EPROCESS address of the specific SYSTEM processes

Today I would like to briefly describe a simple method of obtaining the EPROCESS addresses of some specific system processes, which can be later used as a part of the Local Privilege Escalation exploit. This is an extension to the well known NtQuerySystemInformation (SystemExtendedHandleInformation) EPROCESSes leak. In the typical scenario SystemExtendedHandleInformation class can be used to map all processes of the currently logged in user to the correct EPROCESS address (plus a few more processes that allow OpenProcess with the SYNCHRONIZE flag, but I’ll get to this point later). Implementation of this approach is quite straightforward (some details omitted for the sake of readability):

Continue reading →

by ReWolf

MSI ntiolib.sys/winio.sys local privilege escalation

So, it seems that not only ASUS drivers allows unprivileged reading and writing to physical memory. Just a few months ago I was looking at the drivers that are loaded on my machine, and I found small MSI driver called NTIOLib_X64.sys. Out of curiosity I’ve looked at it in IDA and it turned out that it has almost the same functionality as the ASMMAP/ASMMAP64 ASUS drivers. I’ve tried to contact MSI through various different channels, but I haven’t really get past their customer support, so I’m not sure if anyone from the development team is aware of this design flaw. After almost 4 months I decided to publish my findings here.

Continue reading →

by ReWolf

IceCTF 2016 Slickserver/Slickerserver pwn writeup

It’s almost 6 months since the last post, so to keep some good yearly average it’s finally time to write something here. For the last couple of months, most of my spare time went into various CTF challenges. Since I’m very new to CTFs, usually I’m not able to solve top scoring tasks and people familiar with CTFs probably know that challenges with lower score are not really interesting enough to write anything more than a few lines writeup (and there is usually dozens of writeups already published, before I even think about writing something). So this time it might be a bit different since the IceCTF was 2 weeks long, and I could prepare some good writeup before competition ends. I did two pwn tasks, which are actually very similar to each other. First one was initially for 300 points, but the organizers figured out, that it’s easier than they thought, so they lowered score to 140pts and published improved version of the task for 300pts. Description for both tasks was pretty straight forward Continue reading →

by ReWolf

wow64ext v1.0.0.8

New version of wow64ext library is available for download:
http://rewolf.pl/stuff/rewolf.wow64ext.v1.0.0.8.zip
or if someone prefer github:
https://github.com/rwfpl/rewolf-wow64ext

Changelog

  • Fixed elusive bug that appears only on AMD cpus
  • Removed VS CRT dependencies – dll size shrank to 9kB (previously 41kB)
  • Added sanity checks, so x64 switch won’t run on x86 OS

Continue reading →

by ReWolf

Terminus Project launch.

terminus_logo_blog

I would like to announce launch of my new web-based tool: Terminus Project. It’s automatically generated diff of Windows structures with nice (I hope!) presentation layer. Currently it contains only data gathered from NTDLL PDBs (281 dlls at the moment of writing this post), but it can be easily extended with other libraries. Idea behind this project was derived from my old research on PEB structure (link), which is still quite popular (comparing to the other posts on this blog). There are a few things that should be improved (for example, better support for structures with unions), but I decided to publish it now, so it won’t stay on my HDD for the next few months.

Continue reading →