LAS VEGAS—Joanna Rutkowska has posted her Blue Pill virtualized rootkit for free and open download here, she said during her presentation-cum-skeptics-slapdown at Black Hat on Aug. 1.

Researchers at Matasano earlier in the day delivered presentations on ways to detect the virtualized rootkit in a session titled "Don't Tell Joanna, The Virtualized Rootkit Is Dead." Rutkowska ended the day with her own session, "IsGameOver(), anyone?" in which she answered her own question: No, the game wasn't over, given that Matasano's rootkit detection techniques didn't quite work.

Along with colleague Alexander Tereshkin at her newly launched Invisible Things Lab, Rutkowska has rebuilt Blue Pill from scratch. As described on the BluePill.org site where she's posted the rootkit for download, the new rootkit has been completely rearchitected with a common hypervisor virtual machine layer architecture.

Its new features include on-the-fly loading and unloading—presumably a crucial component of the rootkit's new ability to play chicken as it runs and hides from timing determination detection attacks, aka Blue Chicken Technology.

Click here to read about the earlier research claims that the "Blue Pill" rootkit was detectable.

The new Blue Pill also includes support for nested hypervisors—a capability that will allow the rootkit to survive when a target system simulates an environment and thus forces its simulation to simulate.

Rutkowska has also listed Blue Pill's current limitations. They include what she calls an overly simple cycle emulation in the rootkit's RDTSC (read time stamp counter).

Also, Blue Chicken has a TimeBomb setting algorithm that "seems to contain a mysterious race condition that causes a BSoD [Blue Screen of Death, aka stop error] from time to time after the [timebomb] is set," she says on her site.

Also, Virtual PC 2007 with enabled hardware virtualization currently crashes when run inside a Blue-Pilled machine. The nesting feature also has a feature that Rutkowska said might cause a crash due to CPU identification interception.

Also, among other things, the new Blue Pill lacks support for intercepting "exotic" high-precision local timers, she said.

This article was originally published on eWeek.com.

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