Wednesday, March 7, 2012

The Mystery of the Duqu Framework

Via Securelist.com (Kaspersky Lab) -

While analyzing the components of Duqu, we discovered an interesting anomaly in the main component that is responsible for its business logic, the Payload DLL. We would like to share our findings and ask for help identifying the code.

[...]

Conclusions
  • The Duqu Framework appears to have been written in an unknown programming language.
  • Unlike the rest of the Duqu body, it's not C++ and it's not compiled with Microsoft's Visual C++ 2008.
  • The highly event driven architecture points to code which was designed to be used in pretty much any kind of conditions, including asynchronous commutations.
  • Given the size of the Duqu project, it is possible that another team was responsible for the framework than the team which created the drivers and wrote the system infection and exploits.
  • The mysterious programming language is definitively NOT C++, Objective C, Java, Python, Ada, Lua and many other languages we have checked.
  • Compared to Stuxnet (entirely written in MSVC++), this is one of the defining particularities of the Duqu framework.

The Duqu Framework: What was that?

After having performed countless hours of analysis, we are 100% confident that the Duqu Framework was not programmed with Visual C++. It is possible that its authors used an in-house framework to generate intermediary C code, or they used another completely different programming language.

We would like to make an appeal to the programming community and ask anyone who recognizes the framework, toolkit or the programming language that can generate similar code constructions, to contact us or drop us a comment in this blogpost. We are confident that with your help we can solve this deep mystery in the Duqu story.

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