AMSI Bypass
MITRE ATT&CK™ Impair Defenses: Disable or Modify Tools - Technique T1562.001
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MITRE ATT&CK™ Impair Defenses: Disable or Modify Tools - Technique T1562.001
Last updated
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With the release of PowerShell, Microsoft released . It is a runtime detection measure shipped natively with Windows and is an interface for other products and solutions.
AMSI (Anti-Malware Scan Interface) is a PowerShell security feature that will allow any applications or services to integrate directly into anti-malware products. Defender instruments AMSI to scan payloads and scripts before execution inside the .NET runtime. The and are the runtimes for .NET.
AMSI is fully integrated into the following Windows components:
User Account Control, or UAC
PowerShell
Windows Script Host (wscript and cscript)
JavaScript and VBScript
Office VBA macros
The below diagram depicts how data is dissected as it flows through the layers and what DLLs/API calls are being instrumented.
This is important to understand the complete model of AMSI, but we can break it down into core components, shown in the diagram below.
Note: AMSI is only instrumented when loaded from memory when executed from the CLR. It is assumed that if on disk MsMpEng.exe (Windows Defender) is already being instrumented.
The PowerShell downgrade attack is a very low-hanging fruit that allows attackers to modify the current PowerShell version to remove security features. Most PowerShell sessions will start with the most recent PowerShell engine, but attackers can manually change the version with a one-liner. By "downgrading" the PowerShell version to 2.0, you bypass security features since they were not implemented until version 5.0.
We can simply use this command to downgrad powershell.
Since this attack is such low-hanging fruit and simple in technique, there are a plethora of ways for the blue team to detect and mitigate this attack.
Reflection allows a user or administrator to access and interact with .NET assemblies. It can be abused to modify and identify information from valuable DLLs. The AMSI utilities for PowerShell are stored in the AMSIUtils .NET assembly located in System.Management.Automation.AmsiUtils.
Matt Graeber published a one-liner to accomplish the goal of using Reflection to modify and bypass the AMSI utility. This one-line can be seen in the code block below.
AMSI is primarily instrumented and loaded from amsi.dll. This dll can be abused and forced to point to a response code we want. The AmsiScanBuffer function provides us the hooks and functionality we need to access the pointer/buffer for the response code. AmsiScanBuffer is vulnerable because amsi.dll is loaded into the PowerShell process at startup; our session has the same permission level as the utility. AmsiScanBuffer will scan a "buffer" of suspected code and report it to amsi.dll to determine the response. We can control this function and overwrite the buffer with a clean return code.
At a high-level AMSI patching can be broken up into four steps,
Obtain handle of amsi.dll
Get process address of AmsiScanBuffer
Modify memory protections of AmsiScanBuffer
Write opcodes to AmsiScanBuffer
Using following powershell code, we can patch AMSI memory for current shell.
While it is preferred to use the previous methods shown, attackers can use other automated tools to break AMSI signatures or compile a bypass.
To find where AMSI is instrumented, we can use maintained by which is a GitHub fork of PowerShell with security feature removed, and compare it with an .
is a simple tool for using a PowerShell downgrade attack and inject shellcode straight into memory.
will compile and generate a PowerShell bypass from a collection of known bypasses. From amsi.fail, "AMSI.fail generates obfuscated PowerShell snippets that break or disable AMSI for the current process. The snippets are randomly selected from a small pool of techniques/variations before obfuscating. Every snippet is obfuscated at runtime/request so that no generated output share the same signatures."
allows attackers to automatically identify strings that are flagging signatures to modify and break them. This method of bypassing AMSI is more consistent than others because you are making the file itself clean.
We can use the tools that is a C++ implementation of the AMSI memory patch. It search powershell process and patch the AmsiOpenSession function.
