nitro

Virtual Machine Introspection for KVM.

This is the userland component named nitro. It will receive the events generated by KVM and display them.

Requirements

python 3
docopt
libvirt
ioctl-opt Python 3
cffi Python3 (optional)
libvmi (optional)
rekall (optional)

Setup

Setup a VM. Make sure to use the qemu:///system connection. Go to the tests folder to find a packer template and an import script if you don't have one already.

(Nitro only supports for now Windows XP x64 and Windows 7 x64, see the Note section below)

Usage

Make sure that you have loaded the modified kvm modules. (cd kvm-vmi && make modules && make reload)
Start the VM that you would like to monitor.
Wait for the desktop to be available on the VM.
Start Nitro with ./main.py <vm_name>.

"""Nitro.

Usage:
  main.py [options] <vm_name>

Options:
  -h --help     Show this screen
  --nobackend   Don't analyze events
  -o --output   Output file (stdout if not specified)

"""

Nitro monitors the given <vm_name> syscalls by activating a set of traps in KVM. The optional components listed above are needed only if you want to extract more information about the captured events. See the Backend section.

Here i will assume that you have installed only the required ones. Therefore you have to run Nitro with the option --nobackend.

It will run until the user sends a CTRL+C to stop it, in which case Nitro will unset the traps and write the captured events in a file named events.json.

By defaults, Nitro will print events to stdout. If this is not desired --out can be used to redirect output into a file.

An event should look like this output

  {
    "direction": "enter",
    "rax": "0x1005",
    "vcpu": 0,
    "type": "syscall",
    "cr3": "0x1b965000"
  },

A successful run should give the following output :

$ ./main.py --nobackend nitro_win7x64
Setting traps to False
Finding QEMU pid for domain nitro_win7x64
Detected 1 VCPUs
Setting traps to True
Start listening on VCPU 0
{'cr3': '0x6cdc000',
 'direction': 'exit',
 'rax': '0x3f',
 'type': 'syscall',
 'vcpu': 0}
{'cr3': '0x6cdc000',
 'direction': 'enter',
 'rax': '0x138',
 'type': 'syscall',
 'vcpu': 0}
{'cr3': '0x6cdc000',
 'direction': 'exit',
 'rax': '0x0',
 'type': 'syscall',
 'vcpu': 0}
{'cr3': '0x6cdc000',
 'direction': 'enter',
 'rax': '0x58',
 'type': 'syscall',
 'vcpu': 0}
{'cr3': '0x6cdc000',
 'direction': 'exit',
 'rax': '0x0',
 'type': 'syscall',
 'vcpu': 0}
{'cr3': '0x6cdc000',
 'direction': 'enter',
 'rax': '0x138',
 'type': 'syscall',
 'vcpu': 0}
{'cr3': '0x6cdc000',
 'direction': 'exit',
 'rax': '0x0',
 'type': 'syscall',
 'vcpu': 0}
{'cr3': '0x6cdc000',
 'direction': 'enter',
 'rax': '0x5f',
 'type': 'syscall',
 'vcpu': 0}
Setting traps to False

Backend

The Backend is supposed to analyze raw nitro events, and extract useful informations, such as:

process name
process PID
syscall name

Rekall

Rekall is used in symbols.py to extract the syscall table from the memory dump.

Unfortunately, Rekall is not available as a Debian package. For now you will have to install it system-wide with pip. (Python2)

$ sudo pip2 install --upgrade setuptools pip wheel
$ sudo pip2 install rekall

libvmi

Compile and install libvmi. See the install notes
Configure the file libvmi.conf, which is already provided in the repo

Configure the name of your vm that you want to monitor : (only Windows 7 x64 is supported here)

nitro_win7x64 {
    ostype      = "Windows";
    win_tasks   = 0x188;
    win_pdbase  = 0x28;
    win_pid     = 0x180;
    win_pname   = 0x2e0;
}

At least, the following keys are required :

win_tasks
win_pdbase
win_pid
win_pname

libvmi python wrapper

The python wrapper on top of Libvmi is based on CFFI and needs to be compiled.

$ python3 nitro/build_libvmi.py

Running Nitro with the Backend

If you have installed everything correctly, you can run Nitro : ./main.py nitro_win7x64

An event should now look like this:

  {
    "event": {
      "cr3": "0xbda6000",
      "direction": "enter",
      "type": "syscall",
      "vcpu": 0,
      "rax": "0x14"
    },
    "name": "nt!NtQueryValueKey",
    "process": {
      "name": "services.exe",
      "pid": 456
    }
  },

KVM-VMI / nitro

readme