RE: The Big List of Dodgy Apps

["Dave Korn" <dave dot korn at artimi dot com>]

On 20 March 2007 18:02, Phil Betts wrote:

> It seems that most, if not all, of the offenders insert themselves
> (or rather get themselves inserted) into every process's DLL list.

  Yes, I think that's certainly the most common underlying cause.
 
> I would think it was possible to have cygcheck do something like
> sysinternals' process explorer does to get the DLL list, but to do it
> only on itself - essentially asking the question "to which DLLs am I
> linked?"  The expected DLLs can be eliminated from all enquiries.  If
> the fingerprint of a known offender is detected, it can be reported as
> such.  Anything else can be reported as a "potential problem".

  This seems a reasonably good idea.  I was thinking at one point of adding it
to the cygwin crashdump routines invoked after fork() errors.
 
> A database of known offenders' fingerprints can be built up from the
> submitted cygcheck output once a problem has been resolved.  It may
> also be worth building up a whitelist of known innocent fingerprints.

  Yep.
 
> I don't know what the sysinternals license was before MS closed-sourced
> their apps, but my guess is that it would be necessary to reverse-
> engineer their technique.

  No, absolutely no need at all, it's all reasonably well-documented and
understood stuff.

    cheers,
      DaveK
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