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Every technique
T1631.001Not expressible in SigmaMOBILE

Ptrace System Calls

Defense Evasion · Privilege EscalationAndroid, iOS

Where this stands

No Sigma rule can address this — the telemetry MITRE names has no Sigma logsource behind it.

Sigma has no logsource taxonomy for mobile platforms. MITRE's telemetry here is mobile EDR and device APIs, which no Sigma rule can address.

What the technique is

Adversaries may inject malicious code into processes via ptrace (process trace) system calls in order to evade process-based defenses as well as possibly elevate privileges. Ptrace system call injection is a method of executing arbitrary code in the address space of a separate live process. Ptrace system call injection involves attaching to and modifying a running process. The ptrace system call enables a debugging process to observe and control another process (and each individual thread), including changing memory and register values. Ptrace system call injection is commonly performed by writing arbitrary code into a running process (e.g., by using malloc) then invoking that memory with PTRACE_SETREGS to set the register containing the next instruction to execute. Ptrace system call injection can also be done with PTRACE_POKETEXT/PTRACE_POKEDATA, which copy data to a specific address in the target process's memory (e.g., the current address of the next instruction). Ptrace system call injection may not be possible when targeting processes with high-privileges, and on some systems those that are non-child processes. Running code in the context of another process may allow access to the process's memory, system/network resources, and possibly elevated privileges. […]

Read it on attack.mitre.org

What MITRE says you would watch

  • AN1685

    Application vetting services could look for misuse of dynamic libraries.

  • AN1686

    Application vetting services could look for misuse of dynamic libraries.

Technique names and descriptions © MITRE ATT&CK®, CC BY 4.0. Not endorsed by MITRE.