gmh5225 / warbird-hook

Using Microsoft Warbird to automatically unpack and execute encrypted shellcode in ClipSp.sys without triggering PatchGuard

Warbird Hook

On Windows 10 21H2, ntoskrnl.exe contains a table of pointers named g_kernelCallbacks used for licensing checks (called from nt!SPCall2ServerInternal). The callback table contains pointers to functions in an image named ClipSp.sys, which is a signed driver protected by Microsoft Warbird .

The interesting thing about it is that PatchGuard does not verify the integrity of several image sections, including PAGEwx, which the driver contains in order to decrypt and re-encrypt its own code during runtime.

Thanks to this, we can do the following things:

• Redirect function pointers in g_kernelCallbacks to our own code
• Inject our own shellcode into PAGEwx sections and encrypt it so that Warbird will automatically decrypt and execute our shellcode without hijacking any pointers

References

• Reversal of Windows' Client Licensing Service (ClipSp.sys)
• Reversal of Warbird integration in the MSVC compiler
• Warbird Runtime Reversed Engineered Code

Disclaimer

• Offsets for function pointers are hardcoded for Windows 10 version 19044.1889
• There is a possibility that modifying the encrypted sections may fail because Warbird performs checksums over the decrypted instructions. The structures passed to WarbirdRuntime::CEncryption::DoCrypt contains a checksum field that is verified at the end of the encryption and decryption routines:

struct ENCRYPTED_BLOCK_DATA_READ_WRITE_$(RI)
{
#pragma warbird(begin_shuffle)
    WORD                    dummy1:2;
#pragma warbird(next_shuffle)
    WORD                    dummy2:3;
#pragma warbird(next_shuffle)
    WORD                    dummy3:1;
#pragma warbird(next_shuffle)
    WORD                    fIsEncrypted:1;
#pragma warbird(next_shuffle)
    WORD                    fIsRelocated:1;
#pragma warbird(next_shuffle)
    WORD                    Checksum:CHECKSUM_BIT_COUNT;
#pragma warbird(end_shuffle)
};

One can recalculate the checksum and modify the global structure or patch the check to circumvent this.