Johannes Passing's Blog

Our paper NTrace: Function Boundary Tracing for Windows on IA-32 from WCRE 2009 has now been published on computer.org:

Abstract:

For a long time, dynamic tracing has been an enabling technique for reverse engineering tools. Tracing can not only be used to record the control flow of a particular component such as a piece of malware itself, it is also a way to analyze the interactions of a component and their impact on the rest of the system. Unlike Unix-based systems, for which several dynamic tracing tools are available, Windows has been lacking appropriate tools. From a reverse engineering perspective, however, Windows may be considered the most relevant OS, particularly with respect to malware analysis. In this paper, we present NTrace, a dynamic tracing tool for the Windows kernel, drivers, system libraries, and applications that supports function boundary tracing. NTrace incorporates 2 novel approaches: (1) a way to integrate with Windows Structured Exception Handling and (2) a technique to instrument binary code on IA-32 architectures that is both safe and more efficient than DTrace.

http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/WCRE.2009.12

If you do not feel like reading the paper, you can also take a look at the screencasts:

Part 1. Kernel Mode NTrace:
Tracing NTFS and the I/O manager

Part 2. User Mode NTrace:
Tracing COM loading a DLL