Thanks to the guy from commentaries in previous posts about the packer, one amazing bug in the code was discovered, which I tried to fix quickly. The commentator, without analyzing the packer operation in detail, stated that the code packed with it will not be able to work with SEH if DEP is turned on. Under such conditions the code worked well (because all unpacked code in memory is located within one single PE file section marked as executable. UPX has same operation logic.). However, suddenly the following bug was discovered: if the program is built in MSVC++, uses SEH and has relocations, it will likely crash on first exception (more precisely, if the file was loaded to the address other than base). DEP, of course, has nothing to do with this. The thing is in disastrous IMAGE_LOAD_CONFIG_DIRECTORY directory. It is created by Visual Studio linker. Of useful information it contains the address table (RVA) of SE handlers and a pointer to CRT internal variable __security_cookie. As it turned out, this directory is necessary not only for CRT internals (although it, as it seems, actually doesn't care about this structure), but also for the system loader (at least, in Win7. WinXP, it seems, ignores this directory too). The packer, which I developed, moves this directory to other section (see here). Thus the issue can be fixed by adding several records to relocations table, which is created by the packer. These records will fix the addresses pointing to security cookie and SE handlers table, to let it read necessary information from this directory at loading stage.
Except correcting this bug I updated the packer code to make it buildable with latest version (1.0.0) of PE library (PE Bliss). It is always available to download here.
By the way, about PE Bliss library. Currently in my free time I develop new version, which will have the following features (the list is exemplary and can be changed):
- high-level work with additional types of PE file resources;
- detailed .NET binaries parsing (metadata, signatures, resources);
- library wrapper in C++/CLI, which allows .NET developers to use library functionality comfortably in C# or Visual Basic .NET software.
Download packer sources: packer source
Download binary: packer binary
PS. In Windows 8 and 8.1 image load configuraton directory has been exanded (to support Control Flow Guard), so the packer will be unable to pack newest binaries from that operation systems, if IMAGE_LOAD_CONFIG_DIRECTORY is present.
UPDATE 24.05.2016: relocations generation has been updated. In some rare cases (when TLS data was big enough, and load config directory was present, relocation table addresses could overflow, which resulted in corrupted packed binary).
