Graduate Profiles 2013 - National University of Sciences and ...

HIDDEN ACTIVITY LOGGER WITH ROOTKITIn today’s environment, there is a great emphasis on learning the higher level technologies,whereas kernel/lower level stuff leaves a void to be filled. This is the motivation behinddeveloping a project, where concepts such as rootkits and process activity interception andlogging (low level fiddling) come into play. The purpose is to acquire these skills, whiledeveloping a product that is equally useful in the Information Security Stream.The term rootkit refers to ‘stealth’ i.e. hiding the existence of activity logger itself. Rootkits are ataboo concept, most notoriously used in Trojans, viruses and other forms of malwares. Activitylogging is recording certain types of activities inside a system. Activity Monitoring is performedby products such as Antiviruses and Firewalls.• Firewalls perform network activity monitoring.• Real-time protection mechanisms of AntiViruses and AntiSpywares perform file systemmonitoring.The product uses client/server architecture to implement the stated functionality.At the server side filter driver and rootkit work at the kernel level. Rootkit enables necessary.Components at the server side to remain hidden. The function of the filter driver is to interceptthe filesystem I/O calls and registry I/O call made by the selected processes and logs themdown in separate files for each process. Similarly the LSP monitors the activity taking place onthe network (only activity of selected processes); this activity is reported to the LSP client, whichlogs it down. The keylogger records the keystrokes made on the system. At the client side theuser/administrator sends request to the server side to fetch the data. The data is fetched in rawformat and is parsed at the client side.Syndicate MembersSyndicate SupervisorMuhammad UmairZagham MehmoodSaad AzizDr. Baber Aslam48