Forensic Blogs

An aggregator for digital forensics blogs

by

Quickpost: ExifTool, OLE Files and FlashPix Files

ExifTool can misidentify VBA macro files as FlashPix files.

The binary file format of Office documents (.doc, .xls) uses the Compound File Binary Format, what I like to refer as OLE files. These files can be analyzed with my tool oledump.py.

Starting with Office 2007, the default file format (.docx, .docm, .xlsx, …) is Office Open XML: OOXML. It’s in essence a ZIP container with XML files inside. However, VBA macros inside OOXML files (.docm, .xlsm) are not stored as XML files, they are still stored inside an OLE file: the ZIP container contains a file with name vbaProject.bin. That is an OLE file containing the VBA macros.

This can be observed with my zipdump.py tool:

oledump.py can look inside the ZIP container to analyze the embedded vbaProject.bin file:

And of course, it can handle an OLE file directly:

When ExifTool is given a vbaProject.bin file for analysis, it will misidentify it as a picture file: a FlashPix file.

That’s because when ExifTool doesn’t have enough metadata or an identifying extension to identify an OLE file, it will fall back to FlashPix file detection. That’s because FlashPix files are also based on the OLE file format, and AFAIK ExifTool started out as an image tool:

That is why on VirusTotal, vbaProject.bin files from OOXML files with macros, will be misidentified as FlashPix files:

When the extension of a vbaProject.bin file is changed to .doc, ExifTool will misidentify it as a Word document:

ExifTool is not designed to identify VBA macro files (vbaProject.bin). These files are not Office documents, neither pictures. But since they are also OLE files, ExifTool tries to guess what they are, based on the extension, and if that doesn’t help, it falls back to the FlashPix file format (based on OLE).

There’s no “bug” to fix, you just need to be aware of this particular behavior of ExifTool: it is a tool to extract information from media formats, when it analyses an OLE file and doesn’t have enough metadata/proper file extension, it will fall back to FlashPix identification.

 

Quickpost info

by

Update Of My PDF Tools

This is an update of my PDF tools.

There are a couple of bug fixes for pdf-parser and pdfid.

And 2 new features in pdf-parser, inspired by a private training on maldoc analysis I gave last week. I often get good ideas from my students, and sometimes, even I get a good idea in class 🙂 .

Option -o can now be used to select multiple objects: separate the indices by a comma.

There’s a new environment variable, PDFPARSER_OPTIONS, that can be used to provide extra options you want to include with each execution of pdf-parser.py. This is useful for option -O, an option to parse stream objects.

It’s actually best to always parse stream objects, i.e. always use option -O. But I decided not to make this an option that is on by default, so that the behavior of pdf-parser would remain unchanged. I consider this important for the many people that rely on a predictable behavior of pdf-parser, like teachers and students of infosec trainings where my tools are used/mentioned.

However, always including option -O is tedious and error prone. So now you can have best of both worlds, by defining an environment variable with name PDFPARSER_OPTIONS and value -O.

And finally, I started to add a man page (option -m), like I do with many of my other tools. This is a work in progress: for the moment, it points to my free PDF analysis e-book that explains the use of pdfid and pdf-parser.

pdf-parser_V0_7_3.zip (https)
MD5: 7EB1713631D255B36BC698CD2422C7EB
SHA256: D4D5AC9C26A9D8FEF65CE58A769D3F64A737860DC26606068CCDD3F04FDEA0D7

pdfid_v0_2_6.zip (https)
MD5: 9CCE332914A6C76410F04B7C35DA3155
SHA256: 95F7C91EEFB561F3F3BE9809ED339D85E7109BAA7E128EF056651EE018DBDBA0

by

New Tool: amsiscan.py

amsiscan.py is a Python script that uses Windows 10’s AmsiScanBuffer function to scan input for malware.

It reads one or more files or stdin.

The AmsiScanBuffer function returns 5 possible values when it is called for a scan:

AMSI_RESULT_CLEAN
AMSI_RESULT_NOT_DETECTED
AMSI_RESULT_BLOCKED_BY_ADMIN_START
AMSI_RESULT_BLOCKED_BY_ADMIN_END
AMSI_RESULT_DETECTED

Example:

amsiscan_V0_0_1.zip (https)
MD5: 47E50599E0CFAF1D27416E68394289A0
SHA256: 044E41D7F31D8333CB5295FD6E430933CA67F9AC37CD400D38189C96AE48544D