Memory Dump Analysis Anthology, Volume 1, Revised Edition
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Memory Dump Analysis Anthology, Volume 1, Revised Edition

About the Book

This reference volume consists of revised, edited, cross-referenced, and thematically organized articles from Software Diagnostics Institute and Software Diagnostics Library (former Crash Dump Analysis blog) written in August 2006 - December 2007. This major revision updates tool information and links with ones relevant for Windows 10 and removes obsolete references. Some articles are preserved for historical reasons, and some are updated to reflect the debugger engine changes. The output of WinDbg commands is also remastered to include color highlighting. Most of the content, especially memory analysis pattern language, is still relevant today and for the foreseeable future. Crash dump analysis pattern names are also corrected to reflect the continued expansion of the catalog.

The primary audience for Memory Dump Analysis Anthology reference volumes is: software engineers developing and maintaining products on Windows platforms, technical support, escalation, and site reliability engineers dealing with complex software issues, quality assurance engineers testing software on Windows platforms, security and vulnerability researchers, reverse engineers, malware and memory forensics analysts.

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About the Author

Dmitry Vostokov
Dmitry Vostokov

Dmitry Vostokov is an internationally recognized expert, speaker, educator, scientist, inventor, and author. He is the founder of pattern-oriented software diagnostics, forensics, and prognostics discipline (Systematic Software Diagnostics), and Software Diagnostics Institute. Vostokov has also authored more than 50 books on software diagnostics, anomaly detection and analysis, software and memory forensics, root cause analysis and problem solving, memory dump analysis, debugging, software trace and log analysis, reverse engineering and malware analysis. He has more than 25 years of experience in software architecture, design, development and maintenance in a variety of industries including leadership, technical and people management roles. Dmitry also founded Syndromatix, Anolog.io, BriteTrace, DiaThings, Logtellect, OpenTask Iterative and Incremental Publishing, Software Diagnostics Technology and Services (former Memory Dump Analysis Services), and Software Prognostics. In his spare time, he presents various topics on Debugging TV and explores Software Narratology, its further development as Narratology of Things and Diagnostics of Things (DoT), Software Pathology, and Quantum Software Diagnostics. His current areas of interest are theoretical software diagnostics and its mathematical and computer science foundations, application of formal logic, artificial intelligence, machine learning and data mining to diagnostics and anomaly detection, software diagnostics engineering and diagnostics-driven development, diagnostics workflow and interaction. Recent interest areas also include cloud native computing, security, automation, functional programming, applications of category theory to software diagnostics, development and big data, and diagnostics of artificial intelligence.

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Table of Contents

Preface 19

Acknowledgments 21

About the Author 23

PART 1: Crash Dumps for Beginners 25

Crash Dumps Depicted 25

Right Crash Dumps 26

Crashes Explained 28

Hangs Explained 31

Symbol Files Explained 34

Crashes and Hangs Differentiated 36

Proactive Crash Dumps 39

PART 2: Professional Crash Dump Analysis 43

Minidump Analysis 43

Scripts and WinDbg Commands 43

Component Identification 46

Raw Stack Data Analysis 53

Symbols and Images 63

Interrupts and Exceptions Explained 68

Exceptions Ab Initio 68

X86 Interrupts 69

X64 Interrupts 76

Interrupt Frames and Stack Reconstruction 83

Trap Command on x86 92

Trap Command on x64 100

Exceptions in User Mode 104

How to Distinguish Between 1st and 2nd Chances 109

Who Calls the Postmortem Debugger? 113

Inside Vista Error Reporting 117

Another Look at Page Faults 132

Bugchecks Depicted 135

NMI_HARDWARE_FAILURE 135

IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL 136

KERNEL_MODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED 141

KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED 143

SYSTEM_THREAD_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED 144

CAFF 150

CF 152

Manual Stack Trace Reconstruction 157

WinDbg Tips and Tricks 167

Looking for Strings in a Dump 167

Tracing Win32 API While Debugging a Process 168

Exported NTDLL and Kernel Structures 170

Easy List Traversing 178

Suspending Threads 181

Heap Stack Traces 182

Hypertext Commands 183

Analyzing Hangs Faster 187

Triple Dereference 188

Finding a Needle in a Hay 191

Guessing Stack Trace 193

Coping with Missing Symbolic Information 199

Resolving Symbol Messages 204

The Search for Tags 206

Old Dumps, New Extensions 212

Object Names and Waiting Threads 214

Memory Dumps from Virtual Images 219

Filtering Processes 220

WinDbg Scripts 221

First Encounters 221

Yet another WinDbg Script 222

Deadlocks and Critical Sections 223

Security Problem 224

Hundreds of Crash Dumps 227

Parameterized Scripts 229

Security Issues and Scripts 230

Raw Stack Dump of All Threads (Process Dump) 231

Raw Stack Dump of All Threads (Complete Dump) 236

Case Study 241

Detecting Loops in Code 244

Crash Dump Analysis Checklist 251

Crash Dump Analysis Poster (HTML version) 254

PART 3: Crash Dump Analysis Patterns 255

Multiple Exceptions 255

Dynamic Memory Corruption 257

False Positive Dump 259

Lateral Damage 264

Optimized Code 265

Invalid Pointer 267

Inconsistent Dump 269

Hidden Exception (User Space) 271

Deadlock (Critical Sections) 276

Changed Environment 283

Incorrect Stack Trace 288

OMAP Code Optimization 294

No Component Symbols 298

Insufficient Memory (Committed Memory) 302

Spiking Thread 305

Module Variety 310

Stack Overflow (Kernel Mode) 314

Deadlock (Executive Resources) 323

Insufficient Memory (Handle Leak) 327

Managed Code Exception 331

Truncated Dump 340

Waiting Thread Time (Kernel Dumps) 343

Deadlock (Mixed Objects, User Space) 348

Memory Leak (Process Heap) 356

Missing Thread 362

Unknown Component 367

Memory Leak (.NET Heap) 371

Double Free (Process Heap) 378

Double Free (Kernel Pool) 387

Coincidental Symbolic Information 390

Stack Trace 395

Virtualized Process (WOW64) 400

Stack Trace Collection (Unmanaged Space) 409

Coupled Processes (Strong) 419

High Contention (Executive Resources) 421

Accidental Lock 423

Passive Thread (User Space) 430

Main Thread 437

Insufficient Memory (Kernel Pool) 441

Busy System 449

Historical Information 458

Object Distribution Anomaly (IRP) 459

Local Buffer Overflow 461

Passive System Thread (Kernel Space) 462

Early Crash Dump 466

Hooked Functions (User Space) 469

Custom Exception Handler (User Space) 471

Deadlock (LPC) 474

Special Stack Trace 479

Manual Dump (Kernel) 480

Wait Chain (General) 482

Manual Dump (Process) 487

Wait Chain (Critical Sections) 490

PART 4: Crash Dump Analysis AntiPatterns 493

Alien Component 493

Zippocricy 494

Word of Mouth 495

Wrong Dump 496

Fooled by Description 497

Need the Crash Dump 498

Be Language 499

Fooled by Abbreviation 500

PART 5: A Bit of Science 501

Memory Dump - A Mathematical Definition 501

Threads as Braided Strings in Abstract Space 503

What is Memory Dump Analysis? 506

Memorillion and Quadrimemorillion 507

Four Causes of Crash Dumps 508

Complexity and Memory Dumps 510

What is a Software Defect? 511

PART 6: Fun with Crash Dumps 513

Dump Analysis and Voice Recognition 513

Sending SMS Messages via Dumps 514

WinDbg as a Big Calculator 515

Dumps, Debuggers, and Virtualization 516

Musical Dumps 518

Debugging the Debugger 519

Musical Dumps: Dump2Wave 521

Dump Tomography 522

The Smallest Program 523

Voices from Process Space 526

Crash Dump Analysis Card 528

Listening to Computer Memory 529

Visualizing Memory Dumps 532

Visualizing Memory Leaks 544

Picturing Computer Memory 556

Unicode Illuminated 559

Teaching Binary to Decimal Conversion 560

Crash Dumps and Global Conspiracy 561

PART 7: WinDbg For GDB Users and Vice Versa 563

AT&T and Intel Syntax 563

Installation 565

Disassembler 568

Stack Trace (Backtrace) 573

Local Variables 581

PART 8: Software Troubleshooting 589

Four Pillars 589

Five Golden Rules 590

Critical Thinking 591

Troubleshooting as Debugging 592

PART 9: Reversing and Reconstruction 593

Pooltags 593

The List of Services 594

Reverse Engineering Component Dependencies 596

PART 10: Security 599

Memory Visualization 599

WinDbg is Privacy-Aware 600

Crash Dumps and Security 604

PART 11: The Origin of Crash Dumps 605

JIT Service Debugging 605

Local Crash Dumps in Vista 606

COM+ Crash Dumps 607

Correcting Microsoft Article about Userdump.exe 612

Where did the Crash Dump Come from? 616

Custom Postmortem Debuggers in Vista 618

Resurrecting Dr. Watson in Vista 621

Process Crash - Getting the Dump Manually 624

Upgrading Dr. Watson 627

Savedump.exe and Pagefile 628

Dumping Vista 629

Dumping Processes without Breaking Them 631

Userdump.exe on x64 632

NTSD on x64 Windows 633

Need a Dump? Common Use Cases 634

PART 12: Tools 635

Memory Dump Analysis Using Excel 635

TestDefaultDebugger.NET 636

Cons of Symbol Server 637

StressPrinters: Stressing Printer Autocreation 638

InstantDump (JIT Process Dumper) 639

TestDefaultDebugger 641

DumpAlerts 643

DumpDepends 644

Dump Monitor Suite 645

SystemDump 646

PART 13: Miscellaneous 649

What is KiFastSystemCallRet? 649

Understanding I/O Completion Ports 653

Symbol File Warnings 656

Windows Service Crash Dumps in Vista 658

The Road to Kernel Space 664

Memory Dump Analysis Interview Questions 665

Music for Debugging 666

PDBFinder 667

When a Process Dies Silently 668

ASLR: Address Space Layout Randomization 673

Process and Thread Startup in Vista 678

Race Conditions on a Uniprocessor Machine 680

Yet Another Look at Zw* and Nt* Functions 683

Programmer Universalis 686

Dr. Watson Logs Analysis 687

Post-Debugging Complications 690

The Elements of Crash Dump Analysis Style 691

Crash Dump Analysis in Visual Studio 692

32-bit Stack from 64-bit Dump 694

Asmpedia 695

How WINE Can Help in Crash Dump Analysis 696

Horrors of Debugging Legacy Code 697

UML and Device Drivers 699

Statistics: 100% CPU Spread over all Processes 702

Appendix 703

Crash Dump Analysis Portal 703

Reference Stack Traces 706

Index of WinDbg Commands 707

Cover Images 711

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