Pretty much everyone knows about the AEDebug key.

Turns out this key has a twin brother, called AeDebugProtected.

When the WerpGetDebugger function is called, it calls NtQueryInformationProcess to retrieve a basic information about the process. If the process’s basic info data at position 28 (32-bit!) returns a dword value that if masked with 1 is non-zero then AeDebugProtected key is used…

Okay, this is confusing… Let’s step back.

The traditional way of calling NtQueryInformationProcess with ProcessBasicInformation class is typically delivered using a ‘classic’ definition of _PROCESS_BASIC_INFORMATION structure being:

typedef struct _PROCESS_BASIC_INFORMATION {
    PVOID Reserved1;
    PPEB PebBaseAddress;
    PVOID Reserved2[2];
    ULONG_PTR UniqueProcessId;
    PVOID Reserved3;
} PROCESS_BASIC_INFORMATION;

Of course, available source codes online can give us a more precise definition of this structure e.g. Process Hacker source code defines it as:

typedef struct _PROCESS_BASIC_INFORMATION
{
    NTSTATUS ExitStatus;
    PPEB PebBaseAddress;
    ULONG_PTR AffinityMask;
    KPRIORITY BasePriority;
    HANDLE UniqueProcessId;
    HANDLE InheritedFromUniqueProcessId;
} PROCESS_BASIC_INFORMATION, *PPROCESS_BASIC_INFORMATION;

In both cases the size of a structure is 24 bytes (32-bit system!). When I looked at the code of WerpGetDebugger I was surprised to see that some calls to NtQueryInformationProcess / ProcessBasicInformation rely on a structure that is 32 bytes long!

Okay, so now we know there is some extra information provided by NtQueryInformationProcess to WerpGetDebugger function and that data determines which debug key is being used. Since this ntdll function is simply passed to kernel, I went to look at the code of NtQueryInformationProcess inside ntoskrnl.exe. I quickly discovered that the function does indeed expect a structure that is either 24 or 32 bytes long. Cool.

Continuing my analysis I noticed that the the field at the position 28 is filled in with a result of a call to a function called PsIsProtectedProcess. Protected processes [DOC warning] is a technology described in the past, so not a biggie. And the fact this is what is being checked by the function is of course something we should have expected, given the name used by the Registry Key I mentioned earlier, however… at least we can confirm this with our code analysis…

And here we are with a few conclusive bits:

• NtQueryInformationProcess / ProcessBasicInformation may use 2 different structure versions!
• The field at offset 28 (32-bit!) tells us if the process is protected or not. Depending on this, different AeDebug Registry key will be used to launch debugger when the app crashes.

The longer structure can be prototyped as this:

typedef struct _PROCESS_BASIC_INFORMATION_EXT
{
NTSTATUS ExitStatus;
PPEB PebBaseAddress;
ULONG_PTR AffinityMask;
KPRIORITY BasePriority;
HANDLE UniqueProcessId;
HANDLE InheritedFromUniqueProcessId;
ULONG unknown;
ULONG IsProtectedProcess;
} 

At this is how we arrived at Beyond good ol’ Run key, Part 119.

Okay, not quite yet.

The value under this Protected Registry key that the WerpGetDebugger function will use is not Debugger, but ProtectedDebugger. Yup, we are talking:

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AeDebugProtected\ProtectedDebugger=<exe>