gmh5225 / yara-yaralyzer

Visually inspect YARA and regex matches found in both binary and text data.

THE YARALYZER

Visually inspect regex matches (and their sexier, more cloak and dagger cousins, the YARA matches) found in binary data and/or text. See what happens when you force various character encodings upon those matched bytes. With colors.

Quick Start

pipx install yaralyzer

# Scan against YARA definitions in a file:
yaralyze --yara-rules /secret/vault/sigmunds_malware_rules.yara lacan_buys_the_dip.pdf

# Scan against an arbitrary regular expression:
yaralyze --regex-pattern 'good and evil.*of\s+\w+byte' the_crypto_archipelago.exe

PyPi Users: If you are reading this document on PyPi be aware that it renders a lot better over on GitHub. Pretty pictures, footnotes that work, etc.

What It Do

1. See the actual bytes your YARA rules are matching. No more digging around copy/pasting the start positions reported by YARA into your favorite hex editor. Displays both the bytes matched by YARA as well as a configurable number of bytes before and after each match.
2. Display bytes matching arbitrary regular expressions. If, say, you were trying to determine whether there's a regular expression hidden somewhere in the file you could scan for the pattern '/.+/' and immediately get a window into all the bytes in the file that live between front slashes. Same story for quotes, BOMs, etc. - sky's the limit.
3. Display the result of forcing various character encodings upon the matched areas. Several default character encodings will be forcibly attempted in the region around the match. The chardet library will also be leveraged to see if the bytes fit the pattern of any known encoding. If chardet is confident enough (configurable), the decoding will be displayed.
4. Export the matched regions/decodings to SVG, HTML, and colored text files. Show off your ASCII art.

Why It Do

The Yaralyzer's functionality was extracted from The Pdfalyzer when it became apparent that visualizing and decoding pattern matches in binaries had more utility than just in a PDF analysis tool.

YARA, for those who are unaware¹, is branded as a malware analysis/alerting tool but it's actually both a lot more and a lot less than that. One way to think about it is that YARA is a regular expression matching engine on steroids. It can locate regex matches in binaries like any regex engine but it can also do far wilder things like combine regexes in logical groups, compare regexes against all 256 XORed versions of a binary, and more. Maybe most importantly it provides a standard text based format for people to [i]share[/i] their 'roided regexes. All these features are particularly useful when analyzing or reverse engineering software.

But... that's also all it does. Everything else is up to the user. YARA's just a match enginer. I found myself a bit frustrated trying to use YARA to look at all the matches of a few critical patterns:

1. Bytes between escaped quotes (\".+\" and \'.+\')
2. Bytes between front slashes (/.+/). Fron slashes demarcate a regular expression in many implementations and I was trying to see if any of the bytes matching this pattern were actually regexes.

YARA just tells you the byte position and the matched string but it can't tell you whether those bytes are UTF-8, UTF-16, Latin-1, etc. etc. (or none of the above). I also found myself wanting to understand what was going in the region of the matches and not just in the matches. In other words I wanted to scope the bytes immediately before and after whatever got matched.

Enter The Yaralyzer, which lets you quickly scan the regions around matches while also showing you what those regions would look like if they were interepreted as various character encoding.

Usage

Install it with pip3, or pipx. pipx is a marginally better solution as it guarantees any packages installed with it will be isolated from the rest of your local python environment. Of course if you don't really have a local python environment this is a moot point and you can feel free to install with pip/pip3.

pipx install yaralyzer

pip3 install yaralyzer should also work, though

Run yaralyzer -h to see the command line options (screenshot below).

Example Output

The Yaralyzer can export visualizations to HTML, ANSI colored text, and SVG vector images using the file export functionality that comes with Rich. SVGs can be turned into png format images with a tool like inkscape or cairosvg (Inkscape works a lot better in our experience).

Displays the raw YARA match result:

Display hex, raw python string, and various attempted decodings of both the match and the bytes before and after the match (configurable):

Bonus: see what chardet.detect() thinks about your bytes. It estimates how likely a given chunk of bytes is in a given encoding while also guessing the language.

Footnotes

1. As I was until recently. ↩