starting a process with exactly the same address structure as previous openning - memory

Is it possible to start a process in windows with exactly the same address structure as the previous opening of the process?
To clarify the goal of this question I should mention that I use cheatengine (http://www.cheatengine.org/) to cheat some games! It includes several iterations to find a parameter (e.g. ammunition) and freeze it. However, each time I restart the game, since the memory structure of the game changes, I need to go through the time-consuming iterations again. So, if there were a method bring up the game exactly with the same memory structure as before, I wouldn't need going through iterations.

Not to say it's impossible, but this is essentially too much work due to the dynamic memory allocation routines the process will be using including the new operator and malloc(). Additionally when the DLL's imported by the executable are loaded into memory they have a preferred imagebase but if that address is already used, the OS will load it into a different memory location. Additionally Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) can be enabled on the process which is a security measure that randomizes the memory address of code sections.
The solution to your problem is much easier then what you're asking. To defeat the dynamic memory allocation described above you can still resolve the correct address of a variable by utilizing:
Relative offsets from module bases
Multi-level pointers
Pattern Scanning
Cheat Engine has all 3 of these built into it. When you save an address to your table is often saves it as a module + relative offset. You can pointer scan for the address and save it as a multilevel pointer or reverse the pointer yourself and manually place it in the table. Pattern scanning is achieved by using a CE Script, which you can put right in the Cheat Table.
In this case the ammo variable, may be a "static address" which means it's relative to the base address of the module. you may see it listed in Cheat Engine as "client.dll + 0xDEADCODE". You simply get the base address of the module at runtime and add the relative offset.
If you're looking to make an external hack in C++ you can get started like this.
In an external hack you do this by walking a ToolHelp32Snapshot:
uintptr_t GetModuleBase(const wchar_t * ModuleName, DWORD ProcessId) {
// This structure contains lots of goodies about a module
MODULEENTRY32 ModuleEntry = { 0 };
// Grab a snapshot of all the modules in the specified process
HANDLE SnapShot = CreateToolhelp32Snapshot(TH32CS_SNAPMODULE, ProcessId);
if (!SnapShot)
return NULL;
// You have to initialize the size, otherwise it will not work
ModuleEntry.dwSize = sizeof(ModuleEntry);
// Get the first module in the process
if (!Module32First(SnapShot, &ModuleEntry))
return NULL;
do {
// Check if the module name matches the one we're looking for
if (!wcscmp(ModuleEntry.szModule, ModuleName)) {
// If it does, close the snapshot handle and return the base address
CloseHandle(SnapShot);
return (DWORD)ModuleEntry.modBaseAddr;
}
// Grab the next module in the snapshot
} while (Module32Next(SnapShot, &ModuleEntry));
// We couldn't find the specified module, so return NULL
CloseHandle(SnapShot);
return NULL;
}
To get the Process ID you would do:
bool GetPid(const wchar_t* targetProcess, DWORD* procID)
{
HANDLE snap = CreateToolhelp32Snapshot(TH32CS_SNAPPROCESS, 0);
if (snap && snap != INVALID_HANDLE_VALUE)
{
PROCESSENTRY32 pe;
pe.dwSize = sizeof(pe);
if (Process32First(snap, &pe))
{
do
{
if (!wcscmp(pe.szExeFile, targetProcess))
{
CloseHandle(snap);
*procID = pe.th32ProcessID;
return true;
}
} while (Process32Next(snap, &pe));
}
}
return false;
}
Using my example you would combine these functions and do:
DWORD procId;
GetPid(L"game.exe", &procId);
uintptr_t modBaseAddr = GetModuleBase(L"client.dll", procId);
uintptr_t ammoAddr = modBaseAddr + 0xDEADCODE;
If the address is not "static" you can find a pointer to it, the base address of the pointer must be static and then you just follow the above guide, and dereference each level of the pointer and add an offset.
Of course I have a function for that too :)
uintptr_t FindDmaAddy(HANDLE hProcHandle, uintptr_t BaseAddress, uintptr_t Offsets[], int PointerLevel)
{
uintptr_t pointer = BaseAddress;
uintptr_t pTemp;
uintptr_t pointerAddr;
for (int i = 0; i < PointerLevel; i++)
{
if (i == 0)
{
ReadProcessMemory(hProcHandle, (LPCVOID)pointer, &pTemp, sizeof(pTemp), NULL);
}
pointerAddr = pTemp + Offsets[i];
ReadProcessMemory(hProcHandle, (LPCVOID)pointerAddr, &pTemp, sizeof(pTemp), NULL);
}
return pointerAddr;
}
I would highly recommend watching some Youtube tutorials to see how it's done, much better explained in video format.

Related

How does the Rust `String` type/`read_line` function know how much memory is needed without explicitly being told?

In C, before using the scanf or gets "stdio.h" functions to get and store user input, the programmer has to manually allocate memory for the data that's read to be stored in. In Rust, the std::io::Stdin.read_line function can seemingly be used without the programmer having to manually allocate memory prior. All it needs is for there to be a mutable String variable to store the data it reads in. How does it do this seemingly without knowledge about how much memory will be required?
Well, if you want a detailed explanation, you can dig a bit into the read_line method which is part of the BufRead trait. Heavily simplified, the function look like this.
fn read_line(&mut self, target: &mut String)
loop {
// That method fills the internal buffer of the reader (here stdin)
// and returns a slice reference to whatever part of the buffer was filled.
// That buffer is actually what you need to allocate in advance in C.
let available = self.fill_buf();
match memchr(b'\n', available) {
Some(i) => {
// A '\n' was found, we can extend the string and return.
target.push_str(&available[..=i]);
return;
}
None => {
// No '\n' found, we just have to extend the string.
target.push_str(available);
},
}
}
}
So basically, that method extends the string as long as it does not find a \n character in stdin.
If you want to allocate a bit of memory in advance for the String that you pass to read_line, you can create it using String::with_capacity. This will not prevent the String to reallocate if it is not large enough though.

"memory allocation error: block too big" doing simple integer division

I have a weird issue. LUA 5.3.5, compiled on STM32F429. Free RAM is about 1Mb (memory allocation is using external SDRAM, not the more limited internal RAM on the STM32). Note that working with things like strings works fine, as well. It only seems to be division causing the problem.
This script works:
a=100
b=20
c=a+b
print(c)
This script returns "memory allocation error: block too big:"
a=100
b=20
c=a/b
print(c)
Further research is showing that the problem is not with the division, at all. It is with tostring() which is called by print(). For some reason, tostring() is trying to allocate too much memory when dealing with the result from direct division.
In lstring.c, is the following:
luaS_newlstr():
if (l >= (MAX_SIZE - sizeof(TString))/sizeof(char))
luaM_toobig(L);
When the issue occurs, l == 0xd0600f56
(interestingly, that is a memory address location in the range of the external SDRAM, rather than a valid string size).
If I modify the LUA script to do the following, it works fine:
a=100
b=20
c=math.floor(a/b)
print(c)
I checked and in both cases, c is type==number
As for the question regarding the memory allocation, we are using the dlmalloc() library, configured like this during LUA startup:
ezCmdLua = lua_newstate(ezlua_poolalloc, NULL);
int error = luaL_loadbuffer(ezCmdLua, bfr, len, "ezCmdLua");
if (!error)
{
error = lua_pcall(ezCmdLua, 0, 0, 0);
if (error) {
...
}
}
....
static void *ezlua_poolalloc (void *ud, void *ptr, size_t osize, size_t nsize) {
(void)ud; (void)osize; /* not used */
if (nsize == 0) {
dlfree(ptr);
return NULL;
}
else
return dlrealloc(ptr, nsize);
}
I have confirmed that memory allocation is working properly, and I can do things like string manipulation and printing of strings with no problem at all. In fact, when debugging this issue, the luaS_newlstr() function is called several times prior to the issue occurring, and each time l (the length of the string) is a reasonable value. That is, until I try to print the result of the division. Moving the division around in the script makes no difference (ie, adding things before it like other print statements), so I doubt the stack is being trashed.

vector<reference_wrapper> .. things going out of scope? how does it work?

Use case: I am converting data from a very old program of mine to a database friendly format. There are parts where I have to do multiple passes over the old data, because in particular the keys have to first exist before I can reference them in relationships. So I thought why not put the incomplete parts in a vector of references during the first pass and return it from the working function, so I can easily use that vector to make the second pass over whatever is still incomplete. I like to avoid pointers when possible so I looked into std::reference_wrapper<T> which seemes like exactly what I need .. except I don't understand it's behavior at all.
I have both vector<OldData> old_data and vector<NewData> new_data as member of my conversion class. The converting member function essentially does:
//...
vector<reference_wrapper<NewData>> incomplete;
for(const auto& old_elem : old_data) {
auto& new_ref = *new_data.insert(new_data.end(), convert(old_elem));
if(is_incomplete(new_ref)) incomplete.push_back(ref(new_ref));
}
return incomplete;
However, incomplete is already broken immediately after the for loop. The program compiles, but crashes and produces gibberish. Now I don't know if I placed ref correctly, but this is only one of many tries where I tried to put it somewhere else, use push_back or emplace_back instead, etc. ..
Something seems to be going out of scope, but what? both new_data and old_data are class members, incomplete also lives outside the loop, and according to the documentation, reference_wrapper is copyable.
Here's a simplified MWE that compiles, crashes, and produces gibberish:
// includes ..
using namespace std;
int main() {
int N = 2; // works correctly for N = 1 without any other changes ... ???
vector<string> strs;
vector<reference_wrapper<string>> refs;
for(int i = 0; i < N; ++i) {
string& sref = ref(strs.emplace_back("a"));
refs.push_back(sref);
}
for (const auto& r : refs) cout << r.get(); // crash & gibberish
}
This is g++ 10.2.0 with -std=c++17 if it means anything. Now I will probably just use pointers and be done, but I would like to understand what is going on here, documentation / search does not seem to help..
The problem here is that you are using vector data structure which might re-allocate memory for the entire vector any time that you add an element, so all previous references on that vector most probably get invalidated, you can resolve your problem by using list instead of vector.

Possible runtime error with while loop-Polyspace

I am working with Embedded C language and recently run the MathWorks Polyspace Code Prover (Dynamic analysis) for the whole project to check for critical runtime errors. It found one bug (Red warning) at While loop where I am copying some ROM data into RAM via memory registers.
The code is working fine and as expected but I would like to ask if there is any solution to safely remove this warning. Please find the code example below:
register int32 const *source;
uint32 i=0;
uint32 *dest;
source= (int32*)&ADDR_SWR4_BEGIN;
dest = (uint32*)&ADDR_ARAM_BEGIN;
if ( source != NULL )
{
while ( i < 2048 )
{
dest[i] = (uint32)source[i];
i++;
}
}
My guess is that ADDR_SWR4_BEGIN and ADDR_ARAM_BEGIN is defined in linker script and polyspace didn't compile and link the project that is why it is complaining about the possible run time error or infinite loop.
ADDR_SWR4_BEGIN and ADDR_ARAM_BEGIN are defined as extern in the respective header file.
extern uint32_t ADDR_SWR4_BEGIN;
extern uint32_t ADDR_ARAM_BEGIN;
The warning is red and exact warning is as follow:
Check: Non-terminating Loop
Detail: The Loop is infinite or contains a run-time error
Severity: Unset
Any suggestions would be appreciated.
The code is overall quite fishy.
Bugs
if ( source != NULL ). You just set this pointer to point at an address, so it will obviously not point at NULL. This line is superfluous.
You aren't using volatile when accessing registers/memory, so if this code is executed multiple times, the compiler might make all kinds of strange assumptions. This might be the cause of the diagnostic message.
Bad style/code smell (should be fixed)
Using the register keyword is fishy. This was once a thing in the 1980s when compilers were horrible and couldn't optimize code properly. Nowadays they can do this, and far better than the programmer, so any presence of register in new source code is fishy.
Accessing a register or memory location as int32 and then casting this to unsigned type doesn't make any sense at all. If the data isn't signed, then why are you using a signed type in the first place.
Using home-brewed uint32 types instead of stdint.h is poor style.
Nit-picks (minor remarks)
The (int32*) cast should be const qualified.
The loop is needlessly ugly, could be replaced with a for loop:
for(uint32_t i=0; i<2048; i++)
{
dest[i] = source[i];
}
If PolySpace does not know the value ADDR_ARAM_BEGIN it will assume it could be NULL (or any other value value for its type). While you explicitly test for source being NULL, you do not do the same for dest.
Since both source and dest are assigned from linker constants and in normal circumstances neither should be NULL it is unnecessary to explicitly test for NULL in the control flow and an assert() would be preferable - PolySPace recognises assertions, and will apply the constraint in subsequent analysis, but assert() resolves to nothing when NDEBUG is defined (normally in release builds), so does not impose unnecessary overhead:
const uint32_t* source = (const uint32_t*)&ADDR_SWR4_BEGIN ;
uint32_t* dest = (uint32_t*)&ADDR_ARAM_BEGIN;
// PolySpace constraints asserted
assert( source != NULL ) ;
assert( dest != NULL ) ;
for( int i = 0; i < 2048; i++ )
{
dest[i] = source[i] ;
}
An alternative is to provide PolySpace with a "forced-include" (-include option) to provide explicit definitions so that PolySpace will not consider all possible values to be valid in its analysis. That will probably have the effect of speeding analysis also.
the reason why Polyspace is giving a red error here is that source and dest are pointers to a uint32. Indeed, when you write:
source= (int32*)&ADDR_SWR4_BEGIN
you take the address of the variable ADDR_SWR4_BEGIN and assign it to source.
Hence both pointers are pointing to a buffer of 4 bytes only.
It is then not possible to use these pointers like arrays of 2048 elements.
You should also see an orange check on source[i] giving you information on what's happening with the pointer source.
It seems that ADDR_SWR4_BEGIN and ADDR_SWR4_BEGIN are actually containing addresses.
And in this case, the code should be:
source = (uint32*)ADDR_SWR4_BEGIN;
dest = (uint32*)ADDR_ARAM_BEGIN;
If you do this change in the code, the red error disappears.

Linux module: being notified about task creation and destruction

for Mach kernel API emulation on Linux, I need for my kernel module to get called when a task has been just created or is being terminated.
In my kernel module, this could most nicely be done via Linux Security Modules, but a couple of years ago, they prevented external modules from acting as a LSM by unexporting the needed symbols.
The only other way I could find was to make my module act like a rootkit. Find the syscall table and hook it in there.
Patching the kernel is out of the question. I need my app to be installed easily. Is there any other way?
You can use Kprobes, which enables you to dynamically hook into code in the kernel. You will need to find the right function among the ones involves in creating and destroying processes that give you the information you need. For instance, for tasks created, do_fork() in fork.c would be a good place to start. For tasks destroyed, do_exit. You would want to write a retprobe, which is a kind of kprobe that additionally gives you control at the end of the execution of the function, before it returns. The reason you want control before the function returns is to check if it succeeded in creating the process by checking the return value. If there was an error, then the function will return a negative value or in some cases possibly 0.
You would do this by creating a kretprobe struct:
static struct kretprobe do_fork_probe = {
.entry_handler = (kprobe_opcode_t *) my_do_fork_entry,
.handler = (kprobe_opcode_t *) my_do_fork_ret,
.maxactive = 20,
.data_size = sizeof(struct do_fork_ctx)
};
my_do_fork_entry gets executed when control enters the hooked function, and my_do_fork_ret gets executed just before it returns. You would hook it in as follows:
do_fork_probe.kp.addr =
(kprobe_opcode_t *) kallsyms_lookup_name("do_fork");
if ((ret = register_kretprobe(&do_fork_probe)) <0) {
// handle error
}
In the implementation of your hooks, it's a bit unwieldy to get the arguments and return value. You get these via the saved registers pt_regs data structure. Let's look at the return hook, where on x86 you get the return value via regs->ax.
static int my_do_fork_ret(struct kretprobe_instance *ri, struct pt_regs *regs)
{
struct do_fork_ctx *ctx = (struct do_fork_ctx *) ri->data;
int ret = regs->ax; // This is on x86
if (ret > 0) {
// It's not an error, probably a valid process
}
}
In the entry point, you can get access to the arguments via the registers. e.g. on x86, regs->di is the first argument, regs->si is the second etc. You can google to get the full list. Note that you shouldn't rely on these registers for the arguments in the return hook as the registers may have been overwritten for other computations.
You will surely have to jump many hoops in getting this working, but hopefully this note should set you off in the right direction.

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