Looking at installers of goodware is quite boring. They do the right thing, at least most of the time, and there is not much to see there. However, if you add some scale and automation to it, you may actually find some value there. For both Red and Blue sides of the fence.

The most popular installers (apart from MSI) are Nullsoft and InnoSetup. Luckily, we have good decompilers available for both of them (InnoUnp and 7z), so one wanting to explore the possibilities just needs to run these on a bunch of clean samples.

The decompilation results are interesting for many reasons.

If the installer is signed, it may execute its installation script and may bypass EDRs. I have obviously no idea if it is always the case, but if VT says it’s signed and ‘green’ by all AVs, the chances are high that whatever the sample does, it will be permitted to do so.

The opportunity this fact brings to RT is that some of installers’ actions may help to deliver some functionality that RT can abuse.

Many installers add a run key. It’s a lame use case, but one could run such installer, get all the settings in place via a trusted, signed binary, and then swap the executable referenced by the Run key with a payload of choice.

Another opportunity for RT is domain recycling. Many older installers refer to domains that no longer exist. By combing the decompiled installation scripts you may find domains that you could re-use. It is highly possible that an old, but non-existing software developer had all the green marks from vendors, VT and this setting has never been updated. By recycling such domain you may get a nice way to create a ‘clean’ C2 channel. If you are very very lucky, some people may be still using that old software. What if the software has an auto-update mechanism? These could form potential big bounty wins using a legacy autoupdate mechanism as a supply-chain attack .

DLL sideloading or Lolbin executable spawning via installers is also possible. Either via a clever race condition, one-off opportunities or by leveraging GUI that pauses the installer for a moment (enough time to swap files in a tmp folder). Really depends on scenario and you may not find a lot of such installers, but hey.. it’s possible.

From a forensic perspective, decompilation of installation scripts gives us yet another way to discover clusters of ‘clean’ paths and file names. It can form a nice exclusion list for analysis. There is also a great opportunity to create exclusion list for process parent-child relationships — many installers are ‘told’ to run some executable at the end of the installation, or simply open a browser to navigate to a site in a default browser. Most sandboxes and EDRs are blind to it and their analysis results often include lots of unnecessary artifacts that could potentially be excluded from such reports. For example, if an analyzed sample’s decompilation script tells us the installer does open the browser, the whole chain of events that follow could be excluded from the final report.

Ever wondered what is a source of some process, services, tasks running on a system? Combing through decompiled installation scripts brings a lot of answers to this. And even more, it provides an explanation to many command line switches we see in the process parent-child relationships. We may not know their meaning, but we may learn they are preprogrammed inside the installation scripts! Aka build a nice list of ‘good command line switches’ for specific processes.

The ‘open browser at the end of the installation or uninstall’ scenarios are very useful for us too. We can use them to detect very specific events of users installing software that is outside of the acceptable use policy. Yes, we can use EDR or asset inventory tools for that too, but what if the software is portable? Any clue of an install event is important.

Finally, you could possibly write signatures/yara definitions for installation scripts that could help to detect different version of the same software w/o a need to sandbox them.

I am sure there are more ideas out there.