how does UBIFS get starting point? - filesystems

I know that UBIFS' superblock (starting point) is situated at LEB 0.
but how does kernel (or U-boot) knows where to look at?
I've heard that UBI volume maps PEB and LEB randomly, but I think user should know where physical entry point is located.
I couldn't find any explanation in Google.
please help. thank you.

Related

Finding LBA to PBA mapping table

I have installed a virtual open channel SSD on qemu and am trying to figure the LBA and the corresponding PBA mapping.
I have already gone through different documentation and successfully found the LBA for any file through fibmap API.
However, to find the physical address mapped on the SSD I have to use PBLK where I can find the L2P_MAP. Unfortunately, I can't find that file since it's never generated by my PBLK instance. I am not really sure what's the problem.
My question is : Is there any way to find this LBA to PBA mapping with/without using PBLK?
I would really appreciate any help or suggestion.
Thank you

How are files on network mapped drives handled locally by a windows host?

This is by no means a "give me the solution" question, but more to gain a higher understanding. Please feel free to point to references where I can learn more about this, I've tried searching and all I get are how to's for setting up and accessing network drives.
I want to be able to monitor a file on a windows machine, but the file sits on a shared drive hosted locally. If it is manipulated by another machine, is there a process I can look for that will indicate that the file may be accessed by a resource elsewhere on the network? I understand that the host machine must be available in order to access the file in the first place, but what processes are called to actually manipulate the file. Is this below the OS level? I have access to a minifilter driver that I can ask a more experienced developer on the team to help me with if need be.

QEMU adding new arguments to qemu binary

I am new to qemu development. I am trying to modify qemu to emulate some features of SGX processor on x86 machines using QEMU emulator. Here is what I want to do.
I want to add the following to qemu. I want to start a qemu process with a new argument EECREATE. This when given to qemu-i386 binary should create an encrypted space in memory with few new data structures inside. Like for example,
qemu-system-i386 -hda ubuntu.img -eecreate -m 2G
This command should boot an ubuntu.img and create a encrypted space (need not be big) of memory for the image (In this case create an encrypted space within 2G that is assigned to the ubuntu-img. Basically, the encrypted space should be within a address space of the image.)
Can anyone please let me know the process involved as what needs to be followed to get it working? What files I need to modify? A brief explaination of how the flow of code will be?
I am not able to get any documentation on web and am stuck as where and how to begin.Any help is greatly appreciated.
Thanks
The short answer is "modify vl.c and qemu-options.hx". The latter is there as all the options processing is integrated into the help provision and so forth - i.e. the code is built dynamically. My normal approach is to pick a similar option and see how it's done.
The longer answer is that if you want the code upstreamed, you should probably discuss your proposal on the qemu-devel mailing list.
The #qemu IRC channel on on irc.oftc.net is also helpful. You will no doubt get some feedback. However, I'd suggest you might consider implementing this as a machine parameter rather than a command line option, unless you are going to make it work for all virtual machine types.

Need a kernel mode API that will find the base address of user mode Win32 Dll

I am new to device driver programming. I've followed the available tutorials on the web which has provided helpful information to get started. However now I have embarked on a new project where the exclusive goal is to search for functions which have been hooked by malware or keyloggers. So I think I have sorted out what I need to accomplish this though I still need to be able to locate the load address of the system dll's (i.e. kernel32.dll, user32.dll and the like) that are already loaded in memory. I need the load address so that I can parse their PE to get to the export and import sections. Furthermore adding the load address to the file size will give me a address range to cross reference the addresses of the export functions no ? Cross referencing the the IMPORT address will be a little more involved but it can be done according to my estimates. I thought that building a kernel mode driver would be the right way to go since accessing memory outside the kernel driver's address range would not be an issue for the driver as opposed to a user mode app. How else will I be able to access the addresses located in the EAT and IAT of the target dll ? I know there exist a user mode API that can provide the load address mainly being GetModuleHandle but I would like to find the equivalent in kernel mode. I could write a user mode application that could relay this information to the driver but prefer that this all be done in kernel mode if possible. Any suggestions or comments would be most welcome.
Thanks in advance
Victor
p.s This post has been edited for more clarity. Hopefully it will make it more clear as what I am trying to accomplish.
This is probably not a very good idea to do in kernel mode. When are you going to actually do this and guarantee the process is in a state where you could walk the IAT?
What if the process is in the middle of loading a DLL? If you're executing in-thread (i.e. from a syscall or device IOCTL), what if other threads are executing too? Doing this when you're not the OS is a very difficult proposition to correctly do, and it's very easy to destabilize your customers' machines (hell, it's reasonably hard to do even if you are the OS)
Take a look at LdrGetProcedureAddress and the rest of the gang.
Edit:
MmGetSystemRoutineAddress might also be helpful.
Just wanted to thank everyone for their contribution. I did manage to some further research and discovered that there is a kernel mode API called PsLoadImageNotifyCallback that is able to find the base addresss of any process.

Read data from damaged media

Is it possible to read damaged media (cd, hdd, dvd,...) even if windows explorer bombs out?
What I mean to ask is, whether there is a set of APIs or something that can access the disk at a very low level (below explorer?) and read whatever can be retrieved even if it is only partial, especially if you can still see the file is there from explorer, but can't do anything with it because it is damaged somehow (scratch on cd, etc)?
The main problem with Windows Explorer is that it doesn't support resuming copying after a read error. Most superficially scratched CDs, for example, will fail on different areas of the disk every time you eject and reinsert them.
Therefore, with a utility that supports resuming copy operations, it is possible to read the entire contents of a damaged CD with by doing "eject/reload/resume" a few times.
In fact, this is what a utility I wrote does, and I've never needed anything fancier to read scratched disks. (It simply uses ReadFile and WriteFile.)
One step lower would be opening the raw partition (i.e. disk image) by passing a string such as "\.\F:" (note: slashes are literal here) to CreateFile. It would allow you to read raw sectors from a drive, but reconstructing files from that data would be hard.
In fact, the "\.\" syntax allows you to open devices in the "\GLOBAL??" branch of the Windows Object Manager namespace as if they were files. It's not unlike calling dd with /dev/x as a parameter. There is also a "\Device" branch, but that's only accessible via DeviceIoControl() (i.e. ioctl()), meaning there's no simple ReadFile()/WriteFile() interface.
Anything lower level than that would be device-specific, I guess; like reading raw CD-ROM data (including ECC bits) the way some CD-burning programs do. You'd have to do some research on the specific media (CD, flash, DVD) and what your hardware allows you to do on them.
Note: The backslashes seem to get lost on the way to the web page; you need to pass "backslash backslash dot backslash DeviceName" to CreateFile. You need to escape them, too, of course.
If you want to do it, do it from the Linux side - see: http://sourceforge.net/projects/monkeycity/ opensource
or ready made app and freeware too: http://www.theabsolute.net/sware/dskinv.html
the first step is dd_rescue. After that, you're free to try anything to reconstruct the data.
And there's GNU ddrescue
GNU ddrescue is a data recovery tool. It copies data from one file or block device (hard disc, cdrom, etc) to another, trying to rescue the good parts first in case of read errors.
Make sure to use the 3-arg version (manual):
ddrescue [options] infile outfile [mapfile]
That is, do use a mapfile even if it's optional, because:
If you use the mapfile feature of ddrescue, the data is rescued very efficiently, (only the needed blocks are read). Also you can interrupt the rescue at any time and resume it later at the same point. The mapfile is an essential part of ddrescue's effectiveness. Use it unless you know what you are doing.
And it's also included in Cygwin and Homebrew.
I don't know what layer exists between Windows Explorer and the Win32 APIs. You can try to write a program with the Win32 File I/O stuff. If that doesn't work, then you have to write your own device driver to get any lower.
I've had some luck from the linux side, or using BartPE (http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/), but just seeing the file doesn't always mean the file is going to be recoverable, whether you're trying from Windows or Linux. You're best bet might be to use a trial of a recovery program.
I have had two disks start to disintegrate on me. From the pattern of unreadable sectors I think they had internal flaking of their emulsion. WinXP Explorer just threw up its hands and said the drive didn't even exist.
In both cases I used "GetDataBack for NTFS" from Runtime Software (http://www.runtime.org/). You can download a free trial which will show you what you could get back if you paid for it. When I bought it it was $49, but I see it is now $79.
This program is amazing. It's not necessarily fast as it will reread some sectors over and over, trying to get a consensus value from multiple tries, but when it's done you can get back stuff that you thought was gone forever. I had one drive that it took over 10 hours to analyze, but when it was done I got back over 97% of a 500GB drive. Definitely worth the price.
Another great tool is Beyond Compare. I have rev 2.5.3, but it is currently at 3.?? and costs $30. They have a full-functionality, 30-day trail. It does a great job of copying large quantities of files (and only those that need to be copied) and, unlike Explorer, it doesn't blow up if something fails. It's sort of like a visual rsync for Windows, if you're familiar with that program from the Samba people.
I have no connection with either of the comapnies mentioned other than being a very satisfied customer.
The gold standard for recovering data from a magnetic storage device would have to be SpinRite. It's a commerical app though, so you probably wouldn't learn much from it.
If you have a Linux machine around, I can recommend dvdisaster. It is originally meant for creating error correction files, but it also reads DVDs into an image and ignores read errors; and you can use different drives one after another to get missing sectors filled in the image.

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