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I'm doing one of my first linux crackmes.

In the first blocks of code, it goes inside some anti-debug routine and inside one of those it forks and after it calls a waitpid routine. I can verify it and understand purely the code but I can't get why the creators put this code and how it can be an anti-debug technique. These are the interesting blocks.

Fork and Waitpid calls

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  • This is impossible to tell if you don't show the rest of the code. There are lot of ways to implement an anti-debugger with a sub-process.
    – wisk
    Mar 7, 2019 at 18:23
  • Since it will be no-readable to screenshot other blocks of code, this is the executable I'm trying to analyze: dropbox.com/s/7oagp3scl54btob/reverse_me?dl=0
    – Kartone
    Mar 7, 2019 at 18:40

1 Answer 1

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Basically, the process calls fork, on the child side it'll try to attach a debugger to the parent process:

ptrace(PTRACE_ATTACH, getppid(), 0, 0);

If this syscall failed, it probably means a debugger is already attached to the parent process, this is your anti-debugger. To notify the parent process, the developer relies on the exit code. It's 1 if a debugger is attached, 0 otherwise.

On the parent side, it retrieves the exit code with the macro WEXITSTATUS. In C this is defined as:

#define WEXITSTATUS(x)  (_W_INT(x) >> 8)

Which gives in assembly:

sar     eax, 8
movzx   eax, al
test    eax, eax
jz      short no_debugger

This is another way to do a PTRACE_TRACEME. :)

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  • Thanks, this is a great explanation. May I continue to ask your help in some other parts of this executable that are behind my actual comprehension? Do I need to open other threads?
    – Kartone
    Mar 8, 2019 at 9:42
  • Sure and it's up to you about creating another threads
    – wisk
    Mar 8, 2019 at 20:32
  • I was thinking, why you said that on the child side it'll try to attach a debugger to the parent process? After the fork(), if the JNZ instruction is false I would be into the child process, and the getpid() call would return the PID of the child, why the PID of the parent process? What am I missing?
    – Kartone
    Mar 13, 2019 at 22:55
  • The exectuable uses getppid(note the extra 'p') not getpid. The first function returns the PID of the parent process where the latter returns the current PID.
    – wisk
    Mar 13, 2019 at 22:58
  • OMG, how I missed it...sorry for the dumb question. -_-
    – Kartone
    Mar 13, 2019 at 22:59

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