16. Detection Gaps

Aurora Agent uses ETW to observe a system. However, there are some parts of the system where there are no ETW events or the available events are not easily usable. Also, an attacker might try to prevent ETW events from reaching Aurora.

16.1. Named Pipes

There is no ETW provider that provides information about creation of or connection to named pipes. The only way to observe named pipe events is the Kernel Object Handle provider which provides information about all handles that are opened and closed, but which is therefore very "noisy" and only enabled in the intense configuration.

We've integrated a polling for named pipes that would detect opened named pipes if they exist for more than 10 seconds. In the default configuration we miss named pipes that only exist for a very short amount of time.

16.1.1. Named Pipes - Solution

To close this detection gap:

  • Use Aurora with the "Intense" configuration preset (could cause high CPU load on systems)

  • Additionally install and use Sysmon with

  • this configuration.

16.2. Registry Events

While there are a couple of ETW providers for registry events such as creating keys or writing values (primarily Microsoft-Windows-Kernel-Registry), their information is not directly usable. Each event references other keys by their handle, meaning that all registry handles must be tracked for these events to be useful. Since doing so is fairly expensive in CPU time, Aurora does so in the intense configuration, but not in the standard configuration.

The events for setting values here also are apparently broken; while the manifest contains a field for the written data, it appears to be empty. To query the new value of the registry key, it is necessary to read the registry after receiving the event (which is less reliable since the value might have been changed again).

EventID:2 Provider_Name:Microsoft-Windows-Kernel-Registry
BaseName: BaseObject:0xFFFFB700E2344C40 Disposition:0 KeyObject:0xFFFFB700E23442C0
RelativeName:{34ce6e13-aec9-43ca-a80c-7ee47260ef84} Status:0x0

EventID:7 Provider_Name:Microsoft-Windows-Kernel-Registry
CapturedDataSize:0 DataSize:16 InfoClass:2 KeyName: KeyObject:0xFFFFB700E23442C0
Status:0x0 ValueName:EnableDhcp

Could not parse event ERROR: "failed to parse \"CapturedData\" value; TdhFormatProperty failed; The parameter is incorrect."

These captured events display the issues here: The first event (with Event ID 2) is an OpenKey event. While we see the relative name, the BaseName field is empty. Therefore, in order to determine the full name of the key, we need to correlate this with previous OpenKey events for the key referenced as BaseObject.

The second event (with Event ID 7) is a QueryValue event. Again, the KeyName is empty; instead, the KeyObject field needs to be correlated with previous OpenKey events. The data that was returned from the QueryValue is also missing. There is a field for it, (CapturedData) but it is apparently empty based on the CapturedDataSize and querying its value fails with the displayed error message.

16.2.1. Registry Events - Solution

To close this detection gap:

  • Use Aurora with the "Intense" configuration preset (could cause high CPU load on systems with a lot of registry access events)

  • Additionally install and use Sysmon with

  • this configuration.

We have been in contact with Microsoft to get the registry related ETW events fixed and extended in future Windows versions. However, Microsoft responded that it is hard to determine the real demand for a solution to these issues.

16.3. ETW disabling

Since ETW events partially originate from user space, an attacker can disable user space ETW events from its own process by patching the syscalls that Windows uses to create ETW events. Doing so is, in fact, common for attacker frameworks.

While this does not make Aurora useless, you should be aware of this when writing detection rules that are based on these providers. Usually, any event that originates from the process and is caused by a provider that does not start with Microsoft-Windows-Kernel can be suppressed and should be handled with care.

16.3.1. ETW disabling - Solution

  • The full version of Aurora uses a ETW Canary module to detect ETW manipulations.

  • The flag --report-stats allows you to report the status of the agent to your central log collector (SIEM). This status includes statistics of the observed, process and dropped events that can be used to detect manipulations. (e.g. number of observed events doesn't increase over time)

16.4. Handle polling and asynchronous handles

Some handles are asynchronous, meaning that it is impossible to query their named and type; trying to do so causes the querying thread to permanently hang, ultimately leading to resource leaks. Unfortunately, it is impossible to query from user space whether a handle is asynchronous, so there is no guaranteed way of avoiding these handles either.

In practice, this means that Aurora tries to predict based on a handle's other properties whether a handle would hang and skips those. However, this also causes Aurora to skip some "valid" handles, meaning they won't be listed by the Handle-Polling module.

16.4.1. Handles - Solution

  • Use Aurora with the "Intense" configuration preset (could cause high CPU load on systems)

  • Additionally install and use Sysmon with

  • this configuration

  • to at least guarantee events about named pipes