Writing Yara rules

This section is dedicated to the intricacies of writing Yara rules which can be used by Manalyze.

Introduction

Because Manalyze already includes an (hopefully) efficient PE parser, it was deemed unnecessary to rely on the one that is provided with Yara. The Yara engine provided with Manalyze was essentially stripped down to the library code and contains none of the plugins provided with the original distribution. Custom C++ wrappers were also added to the project. All the modifications to the code may be found on GitHub.

For this reason, Yara rules relying on the original PE module will not work with Manalyze ; they need to be modified so they rely on the one provided to Yara by the tool.

Note

The functionnalities provided by this module are added on a need basis. If you need additional data exposed, please create an issue on GitHub!

Supported commands

All scripts relying on Manalyze’s PE module must start by importing it with the import "manape" directive.

• The entry point of the executable is designated by manape.ep.
• The number of sections is exposed through manape.num_sections.
• For each section, you can access the start address and the size with manape.section[i].start and manape.section[i].size, i being the zero-based index of the section.
• You can scan the VERSION_INFO resource with manape.version_info.start and manape.version_info.size.
• The authenticode signature of the binary can be located through manape.authenticode.start and manape.authenticode.size.

Sample rule

import "manape"

rule D_Win_dot_Trojan_dot_Patched_dash_300
{
        meta:
                signature = "Win.Trojan.Patched-300"
        strings:
                $a0 = { 837c24080175 }
                $a1 = { 726f6341c745e064647265 }
                $a2 = { 43006f006d00700061006e0079004e0061006d006500000000004d006900630072006f0073006f0066007400200043006f00720070006f007200610074006900 }
        condition:
                $a0 at manape.ep and $a1 and $a2 in (manape.version_info.start .. manape.version_info.start + manape.version_info.size)
}