Walking Heap Using Pydbg

I'm a big fan of Pydbg. Although it has many awesome features , it also has few limitations. One of them is lack of control over process heap. For a long time I'm thinking of writing something which makes Heap Manipulation / Heap parsing / Traversing using pydbg little easier for reverse engineers. So finally last weekend I wrote couple of small py scripts which can parse Windows 7 process heaps on the fly.

In this blog post I'm going to share one of them.

This is the simplest implementation of HeapWalk() API based on pydbg. Heap walk API enumerates the memory blocks in the specified heap. If you are not very familiar with HeapWalk() API this page has a very good example in C++.

Right now best available tool available for heap analysis is windbg. The script I'm going to share does something similar to windbg's "!heap -a 0xmyheaphandle" command.

You can use the function HeapWalk() [@ Line 103] as break point hander in your pydbg script. In below example actually I did something similar.

First I'm running an application (on 32 bit Windows 7) which uses user32!MessageBoxA API somewhere.

After that I'm attaching my pydbg script with that process and setting up a break point at user32!MessageBoxA and also setting up HeapWalk() as the breakpoint handler.

Now whenever the application will make a call to MessageBoxA api our breakpoint handler HeapWalk() will be invoked and it will start traversing all the available process heap and their segments.

Script 1:

Since this script will give you addresses of all all heap blocks and their size, now you should have more control over process heap. You should be able to search for string/data / byets / pointer in process heaps very easily.

Thank you for reading. Hope you've enjoyed :)

Cheers,