I’ve written a couple of times on the subject of boot loaders and full disk encryption, but I haven’t really explored it in more detail. With this blog post I hope to dive a bit deeper into how to actually start performing these type of analysis and why they are useful to perform. I’ll start with the usefulness first and then go into the part on how to do it, but will not be fully reversing a disk encryption boot loader. I won’t be doing a lot of hard-core reversing like finding vulnerabilities within the cryptographic operations or reversing custom filesystem implementations, but hopefully provide enough information to get started in the area of reversing unknown boot loaders.
The type of products with which you can use the approaches and techniques described in this blog post are the most useful when applied to full disk encryption (FDE) solutions that are configured to not require pre-boot authentication. The reason being, that you then could potentially obtain the disk decryption key. If the solution requires pre-boot authentication, the information that you can obtain, might be reduced to meta-data or ‘deleted’ files. Which brings us to the whole, why are these type of analysis useful?
The reason of why this is useful, I didn’t fully realise until a couple of years ago when a colleague introduced me to the wonders of all the (hidden) information that FDE solutions may contain. Let’s look at the type of information that you may encounter while investigating these solutions:
- (encrypted) Hidden file systems
- (obfuscated) Encryption keys
- Usernames
- (hashed/encrypted) Passwords
- Windows domain credentials
- Configuration information of the FDE solution
- Files marked for deletion
- Finding 0days and bypassing encryption
Based on the above list of items we can pretty much conclude that analysing FDE solutions is useful from an offensive as well as from a defensive point of view. It can either help us to breach a target network or obtain sensitive information as well as collect forensic evidence or aid us into understanding the specific cryptographic implementation to enable us to decrypt the disk and analyse it. The helper tools I’ve used in this blog post can be found here. Keep on reading if you want to know the rest of all the details and the process I usually follow. I’ll try to describe the following steps:
- Creating a (partial) copy of the disk
- Analysing the disk
- Static & dynamic boot analysis
Since I don’t have easy access to disk encryption software with the exact features I’d like to analyse I’ll be using DiskCryptor as an example product.
For some reason it seems that the products with the most interesting features to reverse engineer have a horrendous ‘request trial’ process as well as not providing trials to a random researcher on the internet :( sad panda :(
The other reason to use DiskCryptor is the fact that it is open source, thus enabling people that want to get started with type of stuff to more easily understand difficult snippets of assembly. My personal approach to a lot of reversing challenges usually revolves around finding a similar open source variant first or finding the open source components used in the proprietary solution if applicable. Reason being that it makes your life a lot easier to understand not only general concepts, but also specific code quirks. A very nice explanation on finding as much information as possible before your start reversing is given by Alex Ionescu in his offensive con keynote ‘Reversing without reversing’.
Oh and there is no specific goal, besides just explaining my general thought process. As a side note I am no reverse engineering expert, so feel free to correct me :-)
Continue reading “Introduction to analysing full disk encryption solutions”
DiabloHorn 