Inhale is a malware analysis and classification tool that is capable of automating and scaling many static analysis operations.
This is the beta release version, for testing purposes, feedback, and community development.
Background
Inhale started as a series of small scripts that used when collecting and analyzing a large amount of malware from diverse sources. There are plenty of frameworks and tools for doing similar work, but none of them really matched my work flow of quickly finding, classifying, and storing information about a large number of files. Some also require expensive API keys and other services that cost money.
The developers have ended up turning these scripts into something that people can quickly set up and use, whether you run from a research server, a laptop, or a low cost computer like a Raspberry Pi.
Install
Inhale is built to run on Linux using Python3, ElasticSearch, radare2, yara and binwalk. jq is also needed to pretty print output from the database. Here are some of the basic instructions to install.
Python3
Install requirements
python3 -m pip install -r requirements.txt
Installing ElasticSearch (Debian)
wget -qO - https://artifacts.elastic.co/GPG-KEY-elasticsearch | sudo apt-key add - sudo apt-get install apt-transport-https echo "deb https://artifacts.elastic.co/packages/7.x/apt stable main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/elastic-7.x.list sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install elasticsearch sudo service elasticsearch start
You can also install manually by following this documentation
Additionally you can set up a full ELK stack for visualization and data analysis purposes. It is not necessary for using this tool.
ELK Stack was a collection of three open-source products — Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana — all developed, managed and maintained by Elastic. The introduction and subsequent addition of Beats turned the stack into a four legged project and led to a renaming of the stack as the Elastic Stack.
Elasticsearch is an open source, full-text search and analysis engine, based on the Apache Lucene search engine.
Installing radare2
It’s important to install radare2 from the repo, and not your package manager. Package manager versions don’t come with all the bells and whistles required for inhale.
git clone https://github.com/radare/radare2 cd radare2 sys/install.sh
Installing Yara
YARA is a software aimed at (but not limited to) helping malware researchers to identify and classify malware samples. With YARA you can create descriptions of malware families (or whatever you want to describe) based on textual or binary patterns. Each description, a.k.a rule, consists of a set of strings and a boolean expression which determine its logic.
Here is the full Yara Documentation
sudo apt-get install automake libtool make gcc wget https://github.com/VirusTotal/yara/archive/v3.10.0.tar.gz tar xvzf v3.10.0.tar.gz cd yara-3.10.0/ ./bootstrap.sh ./configure make sudo make install
If you get any errors about shared objects, try this to fix it.
sudo sh -c 'echo "/usr/local/lib" >> /etc/ld.so.conf' sudo ldconfig
Installing binwalk
Binwalk is a fast, easy to use for analyzing, reverse engineering, and extracting firmware images.
It’s most likely best to simply install binwalk from the repo.
git clone https://github.com/ReFirmLabs/binwalk cd binwalk sudo python3 setup.py install
More information on installing additional features for binwalk is located here.
Usage
Specify the file you are scraping by type:
- -f infile
- -d directory
- -u url
- -r recursive url
Other options:
- -t TAGS Additional Tags
- -b Turn off binwalk signatures with this flag
- -y YARARULES Custom Yara Rules
- -o OUTDIR Store scraped files in specific output dir (default:./files//)
- -i Just print info, don’t add files to database
Examples
Running inhale.py will perform all of the analysis on a given file/directory/url and print it to your terminal.
- View info on /bin/ls, but don’t add to the database
python3 inhale.py -f /bin/ls -i - Add directory ‘malwarez’ to database
python3 inhale.py -d malwarez - Download this file and add to the database
python3 inhale.py -u https://thugcrowd.com/chal/skull
Querying the Database
Use db.sh to query (Soon to be a nice script)
db.sh *something* | jq .
Data Model
The following is the current data model used for the elasticsearch database. Not every one of these will be used for every given file. Any r2_* tags are typically reserved for binaries of some sort.
Name Description
- filename The full path of the binary
- file_ext The file extension
- filesize The file size
- filetype Filetype based on magic value. Not as reliable as binwalk signatures.
- md5 The files MD5 hash
- sha1 The files SHA1 hash
- sha256 The files SHA256 hash
- added The date the file was added
- r2_arch Architecture of the binary file
- r2_baddr The binary’s base address
- r2_binsz The size of the program code
- r2_bits Architecture bits – 8/16/32/64 etc.
- r2_canary Whether or not stack canaries are enabled
- r2_class Binary Class
- r2_compiled The date that the binary was compiled
- r2_dbg_file The debug file of the binary
- r2_intrp The interpreter that the binary calls if dynamically linked
- r2_lang The language of the source code
- r2_lsyms Whether or not there are debug symbols
- r2_machine The machine type, usually means the CPU the binary is for
- r2_os The OS that the machine is supposed to run on
- r2_pic Whether or not there is Position Independent Code
- r2_relocs Whether or not there are relocations
- r2_rpath The run-time search path – if applicable
- r2_stripped Whether or not the binary is stripped
- r2_subsys The binary’s subsystem
- r2_format The binary format
- r2_iorw Whether ioctl calls are present
- r2_type The binary type, whether or not it’s an executable, shared object etc.
- yara Contains a list of yara matches
- binwalk Contains a list of binwalk signatures and their locations in the binary
- tags Any user defined tags passed with the -t flag.
- url The origin url if a file was remotely downloaded
- urls Any URLs that have been pulled from the binary
Solutions to Issues
There are some known issues with this project (mainly to do with versions from package managers), and here I will track anything that has a solution for it.
ElasticSearch index field limit
If you get an error like this:
elasticsearch.exceptions.RequestError: RequestError(400, 'illegal_argument_exception', 'Limit of total fields [1000] in index [inhaled] has been exceeded')
You may have an older version of elasticSearch. You can upgrade, or you can increase the fields limit with this one liner.
curl -XPUT 'localhost:9200/inhaled/_settings' -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d'{ "index" : { "mapping" : { "total_fields" : { "limit" : "100000" }}}}'
Future Features
- Re-doing the bot plugin for Discord / Matrix
- Additional binary analysis features – pulling import/export tables, hashing of specific structures in the header, logging all strings etc.
- Checking if the file is the database before adding. This feature was removed previously due to specific issues with older versions of ES.
- Configuration options for requests such as: user agent, timeout, proxy etc.
- Dockerization of this entire project.
Download Inhale Malware Analysis