Written by: Josh Stroschein, Jae Young Kim
The prevalence of obfuscation and multi-stage layering in today’s malware often forces analysts into tedious and manual debugging sessions. For instance, the primary challenge of analyzing pervasive commodity stealers like AgentTesla isn’t identifying the malware, but quickly cutting through the obfuscated delivery chain to get to the final payload.
Unlike traditional live debugging, Time Travel Debugging (TTD) captures a deterministic, shareable record of a program’s execution. Leveraging TTD’s powerful data model and time travel capabilities allow us to efficiently pivot to the key execution events that lead to the final payload.
This post introduces all of the basics of WinDbg and TTD necessary to start incorporating TTD into your analysis. We demonstrate why it deserves to be a part of your toolkit by walking through an obfuscated multi-stage .NET dropper that performs process hollowing.
What is Time Travel Debugging?
Time Travel Debugging (TTD), a technology offered by Microsoft as part of WinDbg, records a process’s execution into a trace file that can be replayed forwards and backwards. The ability to quickly rewind and replay execution reduces analysis time by eliminating the need to constantly restart debugging sessions or restore virtual machine snapshots. TTD also enables users to query the recorded execution data and filter it with Language Integrated Query (LINQ) to find specifi
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