Combining Sealighter with unpatched exploits and PPLDump to run the Microsoft-Windows-Threat-Intelligence ETW Provider without a signed driver.

The PPLDump exploit is patched on Windows 10 v21H2 Build 19044.1826 and upwards. You can know more about it here and here.

For a similar solution, see my blog on using Vulnerable Drivers for the same purpose.

The Microsoft-Windows-Threat-Intelligence ETW Provider is an excellent tool to detect process injection, and other type of attacks. Unlike usermode hooking or in-process ETW Providers, avoiding or tampering with the Threat-Intelligence is very difficult.

However, to subscribe to this Provider requires a process with very special privileges, marked as Protected Process Light (PPL) 'Anti-Malware' or higher. To legitimately run a program at this level you must submit a driver to Microsoft to be co-signed by them, something not everyone has the inclination or reputation to do.

I originally created a research project named PPLRunner that would allow you create PPL process in a test environment, however it requires Windows to be put into a debug or 'test signing' mode. This could in theory also have the effect of altering the behaviour of the malware or program you are attempting to analyse, which may behave differently if it believes it is not on a 'real' machine.

Back in 2018 Alex Ionescu and James Forshaw presented a series of talks, as well as some blogs, covering many ways you could trick Windows into illegitimately running arbitrary code at the PPL level. A number of these techniques remain unpatched to this day.

In 2021 Clément Labro created the project PPLDump, which uses one of the unpatched techniques Alex and James covered, to trick a PPL-elevated services.exe into loading an arbitrary DLL.

PPLDump uses its elevated access to dump the memory of lsass.exe. I've taken Clément's awesome code, and instead combined it with my ETW Logging tool Sealighter, to enable you to get events from the Microsoft-Windows-Threat-Intelligence logging to the Windows Event Log. This is possible from a 'production' machine, without the need for a signed driver or to put the machine into 'test signing' mode.

To use pre-built binaries, download the SealighterTI.exe and sealigher_provider.man from The Releases Page.

To build manually, first check out the source code (make sure to use --recursive):

git clone --recursive https://github.com/pathtofile/SealighterTI.git

Then build SealighterTI.sln

In most circumstances, only the 'Release' Build will actually inject successfully, so build and use that for 99% of cases

First, move the SealighterTI.exe binary to somewhere accessible by all users, e.g. C:\Program Files. Then open up the sealigher_provider.man in a text editor, and replace all uses of !!SEALIGHTER_LOCATION!! with the full path to the SealighterTI.exe binary. Then from an elevated command prompt run:

wevtutil im path/to/sealigher_provider.man

Then just run SealighterTI.exe. For the first run, I recommend running with the debug flag:

SealighterTI.exe -d

For the first run I also recommend having a copy of Sysinternal's DBGView open with the "Capture Global Win32" option set, so you can see the debug logs from the DLL/PPL Process as well. If run correctly It should look like this:

Once it gets to "press ctrl+c to stop" Open Event Viewer, and you should see events under 'Application and Service Logs/Sealighter/Operational':

To stop the trace, press 'ctrl+c' in the SealighterTI.exe window.

See this blog for the technical details about how everything works.

Yep, I chose to fork PPLDump and alter only the parts I needed to in order to get the ETW Trace working. This is both to ensure people know the exploit parts of the code are courtesy of Clément Labro, but also to make it easy if PPLDump gets updated with any bug fixes I may want to also pull into Sealighter-TI.

This has only been tested on Windows 10 x64.

All of the work to run arbitrary code as PPL is the work of Clément Labro and their PPLDump project. I simply worked on glueing the ETW Logging to the end of it.

The Research from Alex Ionescu and James Forshaw is instrumental in making this project possible.

Filip Olszak has written a great blog about the usefulness of the Threat-Intelligence ETW Provider.

• http://publications.alex-ionescu.com/Recon/Recon%202018%20-%20Unknown%20Known%20DLLs%20and%20other%20code%20integrity%20trust%20violations.pdf
• https://blog.scrt.ch/2021/04/22/bypassing-lsa-protection-in-userland/
• https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2018/08/windows-exploitation-tricks-exploiting.html
• https://www.alex-ionescu.com/?p=97
• https://blog.redbluepurple.io/windows-security-research/kernel-tracing-injection-detection
• https://github.com/itm4n/PPLdump
• https://github.com/pathtofile/PPLRunner
• https://github.com/pathtofile/Sealighter