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Releases: mandiant/capa

v7.3.0

20 Sep 08:43
@mr-tz mr-tz
v7.3.0
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v7.3.0 Latest
Latest

The v7.3.0 capa release comes with the following three major enhancements:

1. Support for VMRay sandbox analysis archives

Unlock powerful malware analysis with capa's new VMRay sandbox integration! Simply provide a VMRay analysis archive, and capa will automatically extract and match capabilities to streamline your workflow. This is the second support for the analysis of dynamic analysis results after CAPE.

2. Support for BinExport files generated by Ghidra

BinExport files store disassembled data into a Protocol Buffer format. capa now supports the analysis of BinExport files generated by Ghidra. Using Ghidra and the BinExport file format users can now analyze ARM (AARCH64) ELF files targeting Android.

3. Introducing the capa rules website

You can now browse capa's default rule set at https://mandiant.github.io/capa/rules. In modern terminals the CLI capa tool hyperlinks to resources on the web, including entries on the capa rules website.
Furthermore, https://mandiant.github.io/capa provides a landing page for the capa tool project.

Additional updates

  • capa Explorer Web received several enhancements and bug fixes.
  • Support for the IDA Pro 9.0 IDAPython API while keeping compatibility to older IDA Pro versions
  • Six rules have been added and two rules have been updated

Thanks to @r-sm2024 for their contribution in #2155 and their further work. And of course a big thanks to the community for reporting issues, participating in discussions, and supporting the capa tool and capa rules.

New Features

New Rules (6)

Bug Fixes

capa explorer IDA Pro plugin

  • update IDAPython to IDA Pro 9.0 @mr-tz
  • fix byte search IDA Pro 7.5 compatibility @mr-tz #2371

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williballenthin, mr-tz, and 5 other contributors
Assets 6
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v7.2.0

20 Aug 18:15
@mr-tz mr-tz
v7.2.0
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v7.2.0

capa v7.2.0 introduces a first version of capa explorer web: a web-based user interface to inspect capa results using your browser. Users can inspect capa result JSON documents in an online web instance or a standalone HTML page for offline usage. capa explorer supports interactive exploring of capa results to make it easier to understand them. Users can filter, sort, and see the details of all identified capabilities. capa explorer web was worked on by @s-ff as part of a GSoC project, and it is available at https://mandiant.github.io/capa/explorer/#/.

This release also adds a feature extractor for output from the DRAKVUF sandbox. Now, analysts can pass the resulting drakmon.log file to capa and extract capabilities from the artifacts captured by the sandbox. This feature extractor will also be added to the DRAKVUF sandbox as a post-processing script, and it was worked on by @yelhamer as part of a GSoC project.

Additionally, we fixed several bugs handling ELF files, and added the ability to filter capa analysis by functions or processes. We also added support to the IDA Pro extractor to leverage analyst recovered API names.

Special thanks to our repeat and new contributors:

New Features

  • webui: explore capa analysis results in a web-based UI online and offline #2224 @s-ff
  • support analyzing DRAKVUF traces #2143 @yelhamer
  • IDA extractor: extract names from dynamically resolved APIs stored in renamed global variables #2201 @Ana06
  • cli: add the ability to select which specific functions or processes to analyze @yelhamer

Breaking Changes

New Rules (5)

Bug Fixes

capa explorer IDA Pro plugin

Development

  • CI: use macos-12 since macos-11 is deprecated and will be removed on June 28th, 2024 #2173 @mr-tz
  • CI: update Binary Ninja version to 4.1 and use Python 3.9 to test it #2211 @xusheng6
  • CI: update tests.yml workflow to exclude web and documentation files #2263 @s-ff
  • CI: update build.yml workflow to exclude web and documentation files #2270 @s-ff

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williballenthin, Ana06, and 8 other contributors
Assets 6
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v7.1.0

14 Jun 11:00
@mr-tz mr-tz
v7.1.0
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v7.1.0

The v7.1.0 release brings large performance improvements to capa's rule matching engine.
Additionally, we've fixed various bugs and added new features for people using and developing capa.

This capa version now supports Python 3.12.

Special thanks to our repeat and new contributors:

New Features

New Rules (25)

Bug Fixes

capa explorer IDA Pro plugin

  • replace deprecated IDA API find_binary with bin_search #1606 @s-ff

Development

  • ci: Fix PR review in the changelog check GH action #2004 @Ana06
  • ci: use rules number badge stored in our bot gist and generated using schneegans/dynamic-badges-action #2001 capa-rules#882 @Ana06
  • ci: update github workflows to use latest version of actions that were using a deprecated version of node #1967 #2003 capa-rules#883 @sjha2048 @Ana06
  • ci: update binja version to stable 4.0 #2016 @xusheng6
  • ci: update github workflows to reflect the latest ghidrathon installation and bumped up jep, ghidra versions #2020 @psahithireddy
  • ci: include rule caching in PyInstaller build process #2097 @s-ff
  • add deptry support #1497 @s-ff

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williballenthin, Ana06, and 13 other contributors
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v7.0.1

02 Feb 10:23
@mr-tz mr-tz
v7.0.1
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v7.0.1

This release fixes a circular import error when using capa as a library.

Bug Fixes

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v7.0.0

01 Feb 14:26
@mr-tz mr-tz
v7.0.0
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v7.0.0

This is the v7.0.0 release of capa which was mainly worked on during the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2023. A huge
shoutout to our GSoC contributors @colton-gabertan and @yelhamer for their amazing work. See our blog posts for more details:

Also, a big thanks to the other contributors: @aaronatp, @Aayush-Goel-04, @bkojusner, @doomedraven, @ruppde, @larchchen, @JCoonradt, and @xusheng6.

New Features

Breaking Changes

New Rules (41)

Bug Fixes

capa explorer IDA Pro plugin

  • various integration updates and minor bug fixes

Development

Developer Notes

With this new release, many classes and concepts have been split up into static (mostly identical to the
prior implementations) and dynamic ones. For example, the legacy FeatureExtractor class has been renamed to
StaticFeatureExtractor and the DynamicFeatureExtractor has been added.

Starting from version 7.0, we have moved the component responsible for feature extractor from main to a new
capabilities' module. Now, users wishing to utilize capa’s feature extraction abilities should use that module instead
of importing the relevant logic from the main file.

For sandbox-based feature extractors, we are using Pydantic models. Contributions of more models for other sandboxes
are very welcome!

With this release we've reorganized the logic found in main() to localize logic and ease readability and ease changes
and integrations. The new "main routines" are expected to be used only within main functions, either capa main or
related scripts. These functions should not be invoked from library code.

Beyond copying code around, we've refined the handling of the input file/format/backend. The logic for picking the
format and backend is more consistent. We've documented that the input file is not necessarily the sample itself
(cape/freeze/etc.) inputs are not actually the sample.

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williballenthin, gmacon, and 14 other contributors
Assets 6
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v7.0.0-beta

24 Jan 13:59
@mr-tz mr-tz
v7.0.0-beta
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v7.0.0-beta Pre-release
Pre-release

This is the beta release of capa v7.0 which was mainly worked on during the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2023. A huge
shoutout to @colton-gabertan and @yelhamer for their amazing work.

Also a big thanks to the other contributors: @aaronatp, @Aayush-Goel-04, @bkojusner, @doomedraven, @ruppde, and @xusheng6.

New Features

Breaking Changes

  • remove the SCOPE_* constants in favor of the Scope enum #1764 @williballenthin
  • protobuf: deprecate RuleMetadata.scope in favor of RuleMetadata.scopes @williballenthin
  • protobuf: deprecate Metadata.analysis in favor of Metadata.analysis2 that is dynamic analysis aware @williballenthin
  • update freeze format to v3, adding support for dynamic analysis @williballenthin
  • extractor: ignore DLL name for api features #1815 @mr-tz

New Rules (41)

Bug Fixes

Development

Developer Notes

With this new release, many classes and concepts have been split up into static (mostly identical to the
prior implementations) and dynamic ones. For example, the legacy FeatureExtractor class has been renamed to
StaticFeatureExtractor and the DynamicFeatureExtractor has been added.

Starting from version 7.0, we have moved the component responsible for feature extractor from main to a new
capabilities' module. Now, users wishing to utilize capa’s feature extraction abilities should use that module instead
of importing the relevant logic from the main file.

For sandbox-based feature extractors, we are using Pydantic models. Contributions of more models for other sandboxes
are very welcome!

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williballenthin, gmacon, and 12 other contributors
Assets 6
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v6.1.0

25 Aug 09:12
@williballenthin williballenthin
v6.1.0
9d21add
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v6.1.0

capa v6.1.0 is a bug fix release, most notably fixing unhandled exceptions in the capa explorer IDA Pro plugin. @Aayush-Goel-04 put a lot of effort into improving code quality and adding a script for rule authors. The script shows which features are present in a sample but not referenced by any existing rule. You could use this script to find opportunities for new rules.

Speaking of new rules, we have eight additions, coming from Ronnie, Jakub, Moritz, Ervin, and still@teamt5.org!

New Features

New Rules (8)

Modified rules (9)

Renamed rules (1)

Bug Fixes

capa explorer IDA Pro plugin

EDIT: a standalone binary created using Python 3.11 is now available.

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williballenthin, mr-tz, and 4 other contributors
Assets 6
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v6.0.0

18 Jul 16:29
@williballenthin williballenthin
v6.0.0
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v6.0.0

v6.0.0

capa v6.0 brings many bug fixes and quality improvements, including 64 rule updates and 26 new rules. We're now publishing to PyPI via Trusted Publishing and have migrated to using a pyproject.toml file. @Aayush-Goel-04 contributed a lot of new code across many files, so please welcome them to the project, along with @anders-v @crowface28 @dkelly2e @RonnieSalomonsen and @ejfocampo as first-time rule contributors!

For those that use capa as a library, we've introduced some limited breaking changes that better represent data types (versus less-structured data like dictionaries and strings). With the recent deprecation, we've also dropped support for Python 3.7.

New Features

Breaking Changes

New Rules (26)

Bug Fixes

  • extractor: add a Binary Ninja test that asserts its version #1487 @xusheng6
  • extractor: update Binary Ninja stack string detection after the new constant outlining feature #1473 @xusheng6
  • extractor: update vivisect Arch extraction #1334 @mr-tz
  • extractor: avoid Binary Ninja exception when analyzing certain files #1441 @xusheng6
  • symtab: fix struct.unpack() format for 64-bit ELF files @yelhamer
  • symtab: safeguard against ZeroDivisionError for files containing a symtab with a null entry size @yelhamer
  • improve ELF strtab and needed parsing @mr-tz
  • better handle exceptional cases when parsing ELF files #1458 @Aayush-Goel-04
  • improved testing coverage for Binary Ninja backend #1446 @Aayush-Goel-04
  • add logging and print redirect to tqdm for capa main #749 @Aayush-Goel-04
  • extractor: fix binja installation path detection does not work with Python 3.11
  • tests: refine the IDA test runner script #1513 @williballenthin
  • output: don't leave behind traces of progress bar @williballenthin
  • import-to-ida: fix bug introduced with JSON report changes in v5 #1584 @williballenthin
  • main: don't show spinner when emitting debug messages #1636 @williballenthin

capa explorer IDA Pro plugin

Development

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williballenthin, dkelly2e, and 9 other contributors
Assets 5
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v5.1.0

06 Apr 11:11
@mr-tz mr-tz
v5.1.0
7c4a46b
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v5.1.0

capa version 5.1.0 adds a Protocol Buffers (protobuf) format for result documents. Additionally, the Vector35 team contributed a new feature extractor using Binary Ninja. Other new features are a new CLI flag to override the detected operating system, functionality to read and render existing result documents, and a output color format that's easier to read.

Over 25 capa rules have been added and improved.

Thanks for all the support, especially to @xusheng6, @captainGeech42, @ggold7046, @manasghandat, @ooprathamm, @linpeiyu164, @yelhamer, @HongThatCong, @naikordian, @stevemk14ebr, @emtuls, @raymondlleong, @bkojusner, @joren485, and everyone else who submitted bugs and provided feedback!

New Features

New Rules (26)

Bug Fixes

  • extractor: removed '.dynsym' as the library name for ELF imports #1318 @stevemk14ebr
  • extractor: fix vivisect loop detection corner case #1310 @mr-tz
  • match: extend OS characteristic to match OS_ANY to all supported OSes #1324 @mike-hunhoff
  • extractor: fix IDA and vivisect string and bytes features overlap and tests #1327 #1336 @xusheng6

capa explorer IDA Pro plugin

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williballenthin, captainGeech42, and 15 other contributors
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v5.0.0

08 Feb 20:37
@mr-tz mr-tz
v5.0.0
c2346f4
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v5.0.0

This capa version comes with major improvements and additions to better handle .NET binaries. To showcase this we've updated and added over 30 .NET rules.

Additionally, capa now caches its rule set for better performance. The capa explorer also caches its analysis results, so that multiple IDA Pro or plugin invocations don't need to repeat the same analysis.

We have removed the SMDA backend and changed the program return codes to be positive numbers.

Other improvements to highlight include better ELF OS detection, various rendering bug fixes, and enhancements to the feature extraction. We've also added support for Python 3.11.

Thanks for all the support, especially to @jsoref, @bkojusner, @edeca, @richardweiss80, @joren485, @ryantxu1, @mwilliams31, @anushkavirgaonkar, @MalwareMechanic, @Still34, @dzbeck, @johnk3r, and everyone else who submitted bugs and provided feedback!

New Features

Breaking Changes

New Rules (77)

Bug Fixes

capa explorer IDA Pro plugin

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williballenthin, edeca, and 15 other contributors
Assets 5
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