Wednesday 17 April 2019

ProcessDebugObjectHandle Anti-Anti-Debug Trick

During my implementation of NT Debug Object support in NtObjectManager (see a related blog here) I added support to open the debug object for a process by using the ProcessDebugObjectHandle process information class. This immediately struck me as something which could be used for anti-debugging, so I did a few searches and sure enough I was right, it's already documented (for example this link).

With that out of the way I went back to doing whatever it was I should have really been doing. Well not really, instead I considered how you could bypass this anti-debug check. This information was harder to find, and typically you just hook NtQueryInformationProcess and change the return values. I wanted to do something more sneaky, so I looked at various examples to see how the check is done. In pretty much all cases the implementation is:

BOOL IsProcessBeingDebugged() { HANDLE hDebugObject; NTSTATUS status = NtQueryInformationProcess(GetCurrentProcess(), ProcessDebugObjectHandle, hDebugObject, sizeof(hDebugObject), NULL); if (NT_SUCCESS(status) && hDebugObject) { return TRUE; } return FALSE; }

The code checks if the query is successful and then whether a valid debug object handle has been returned, returning TRUE if that's the case. This would indicate the process is being debugged. If the an error occurs or the debug object handle is NULL, then it indicates the process is not being debugged.

To progress I'd now analyse the logic and find the failure conditions for the detection, fortunately the code isn't very big. We want the function to return FALSE even though the debugger is attached, this means we need to either:

  • Make the query return an error code even though a debugger is attached, or...
  • Let the query succeed but return a NULL handle.
We've reached the limit with what we can do staring at the anti-debug code. We'll dig into the other side, the kernel implementation of the information class. It boils down to a single function:

NTSTATUS DbgkOpenProcessDebugPort(PEPROCESS Process, PHANDLE DebugObject) { if (!Process->DebugPort) return STATUS_PORT_NOT_SET; if (PsTestProtectedProcessIncompatibility(Process, KeGetCurrentProcess())) { return STATUS_PROCESS_IS_PROTECTED; } return ObOpenObjectByPointer(Process->DebugObject, MAXIMUM_ALLOWED, DbgkDebugObjectType, UserMode, DebugObject); 
} 


There are three failure cases in this code:

  1. If there's no debug port attached then return STATUS_PORT_NOT_SET.
  2. If the process holding the debug port is at a higher protection level return STATUS_PROCESS_IS_PROTECTED.
  3. Finally open a handle to the debug object and return the status code from the open operation.
For our purposes case 1 is a non-starter as it means the process is not being debugged. Case 2 is interesting but as the Process object parameter (which comes from the handle passed in the query) will be the same as KeGetCurrentProcess that'd never fail. We're therefore all in on case 3. It turns out that the debug objects, like many kernel objects are securable resources. We can confirm that by using NtObjectManager by querying for the DebugObject type and checking its SecurityRequired flag.

PowerShell executing "Get-NtType DebugObject | Select SecurityRequired" and returning True.

If SecurityRequired is true then it means the object must have a security descriptor whether it has a name or not. Therefore we can cause the call to ObOpenObjectByPointer to fail by setting a security descriptor which prevents the process using the anti-debug check opening the debug object and therefore returning FALSE from the check.

To test that we need a debugger and a debuggee. As I do my best to avoid writing new C++ code I converted the anti-debug code to C# using my NtApiDotNet library:


using (var result = NtProcess.Current.OpenDebugObject(false)) { if (result.IsSuccess) { Console.ForegroundColor = ConsoleColor.Red; Console.WriteLine("[ERROR] We're being Debugged, stahp!"); } else { Console.ForegroundColor = ConsoleColor.Green; Console.WriteLine("[SUCCESS] Go ahead, we're cool!"); } }

I don't bother to check for a NULL handle as the kernel code indicates that can't happen, either you get an error, or you get a valid handle. Anyway it doesn't need to be robust, ..., for me ;-)

For the debugger, again we can write it in C#:

Win32ProcessConfig config = new Win32ProcessConfig(); config.ApplicationName = @"Path\To\Debuggee.exe"; config.CommandLine = "debuggee"; config.CreationFlags = CreateProcessFlags.DebugProcess; using (var p = Win32Process.CreateProcess(config)) { using (var dbg = p.Process.OpenDebugObject()) { SecurityDescriptor sd = new SecurityDescriptor(""); dbg.SetSecurityDescriptor(sd, SecurityInformation.Dacl); while (true) { var e = dbg.WaitForDebugEvent(); e.Continue(); if (e is ExitProcessDebugEvent) { break; } } } }

This code is pretty simple, we create the debuggee process with the DebugProcess flag. When CreateProcess is called the APIs will create a new debug object and attach it to the new process. We can then open the debug object and set an appropriate security descriptor to block the open call in the debuggee. Finally we can just poll the debug object which resumes the target, looping until completion.

What can we set as the security descriptor? The obvious choice would be to set an empty DACL which blocks all access. This is distinct from a NULL DACL which allows anyone access. We can specify an empty DACL in SDDL format using "D:". If you test with an empty DACL the debuggee can still open the debug object, this is because the kernel specified MAXIMUM_ALLOWED, as the current user is the owner of the object this allows for READ_CONTROL and WRITE_DAC access to be granted. If we're an administrator we can change the owner field (or by using a WontFix bug) however instead we'll just specify the OWNER_RIGHTS SID with no access. This will block all access to the owner. The SDDL for that is "D:(A;;0;;;OW)".

If you put this all together yourself you'll find it works as expected. We've successfully circumvented the anti-debug check. Of course this anti-debug technique is unlikely to be used in isolation, so it's not likely to be of much real use.


The anti-debug author is trying to model one state variable, whether a process is being debugged, by observing the state of something else, the success or failure from opening the debug object port. You might assume that as the anti-debug check is directly interacting with a debug artefact then there's a direct connection between the two states. However as I've shown that's not the case as there's multiple ways the failure case can manifest. The code could be corrected to check explicitly for STATUS_PORT_NOT_SET and only then indicate the process is not being debugged. Of course this behavior is not documented anywhere, and even it was could be subject to change.

The problem with the anti-debug code is not that you can set a security descriptor on the debug object and get it to fail but the code itself does take into accurately take into account the thing its trying to check. This problem demonstrates the fundamental difficulty in writing secure code, specifically:

Any non-trivial program has a state space too large to accurately model in finite time which leads to unexpected or undefined behavior.

Or put another way:

The time constrained programmer writes what works in testing, not what is correct.

While bypassing anti-debug is hardly a major security issue (well unless you write DRM code), the process I followed here is pretty much the same for any of my bugs. I thought it'd be interesting to see my approach to these sorts of problems.