ASM HalosGate Direct System Caller

Assembly HalosGate implementation that directly calls Windows System Calls, evades EDR User Land hooks, and displays the PPID of the explorer.exe process.

• In this screenshot the "NtQuerySystemInformation" & "NtAllocateVirtualMemory" NTDLL.DLL APIs systemcalls are discovered by using the HalosGate technique after failing to retrieve them via HellsGate technique due to EDR UserLand hooks.
• After the systemcalls are resolved via the HellsGate and HalosGate method, they are are called directly. The code in NTDLL is never executed.

To Do List

• Obfuscate the strings for that are used for resolving the addresses of the NTDLL symbols
  • Or use hashing
• Need to fix some bugs when switching from debug to release mode in visual studio's (Fixed 05/08/21)
• Need to figure out how to properly overload the call to HellDescent() (Fixed 05/08/21)
• Clean up the assembly functions, they are messy and could be better (Some cleanup 05/08/21)
• Do better checking for the process image name so it doesnt conflict with other processes named explorer (Fixed 05/08/21)
• Better error handling (Some better handling 05/08/21)
• Make this into a cobalt strike beacon object file ( Complete! 06/08/21)
  • See HalosGate Processlist Cobalt Strike BOF project! ;)
• Build on this project for process injection / syscall PS
• Use halos gate to handle EDR hooks. (Implemented in this project on 05/08/21)

Credits / References

• Reenz0h from @SEKTOR7net (Creator of the HalosGate technique )
  • This HalosGate project is based on the work of Reenz0h.
  • Most of the C techniques I use are from Reenz0h's awesome courses and blogs
  • Best classes for malware development out there.
  • Creator of the halos gate technique. His work was the motivation for this work.
  • https://blog.sektor7.net/#!res/2021/halosgate.md
  • https://institute.sektor7.net/
• @smelly__vx & @am0nsec ( Creators/Publishers of the Hells Gate technique )
  • Could not have made my implementation of HellsGate without them :)
  • Awesome work on this method, really enjoyed working through it myself. Thank you!
  • https://github.com/am0nsec/HellsGate
  • Link to the Hell's Gate paper: https://vxug.fakedoma.in/papers/VXUG/Exclusive/HellsGate.pdf
• Pavel Yosifovich (@zodiacon)
  • I learned how to correctly call NtQuerySystemInformation from Pavel's class on pentester academy. Full credits to Pavel for this. (BTW Pavel is an awesome teacher and I 100% recommend).
  • Windows Process Injection for Red-Blue Teams - Module 2: NTQuerySystemInformation