Lib.rs

What's YARA-X?

YARA-X is completely new implementation of YARA in Rust. This project is not production-ready yet, but it is mostly usable and evolving very quickly. The ultimate goal of YARA-X is to serve as the future replacement for YARA.

Changes with respect to YARA 4.x

This section describes the differences that YARA-X has with respect to YARA 4.x so far. These differences are not set in stone yet and may change in the future.

Negative numbers are not accepted in array indexing

The expression @a[-1] is valid in YARA 4.x, but its value is always undefined. In YARA-X this is an error.

Duplicate rule modifiers are not accepted

In YARA 4.x rules can have any number of global or private, for example the following is valid:

global global global rule duplicated_global  {
   ... 
}

In YARA-X you can specify each modifier once. They can still appear in any order, though.

<quantifier> of <tuple> statements accept tuples of boolean expressions

In YARA 4.x the of statement accepts a tuple of string or rule identifiers. In both cases the identifiers can contain wildcards. For example both of these are valid:

1 of ($a, $c, $b*, $*)

1 of (some_rule, another_rule*)

The first case remains the same, but the second one has been generalized to accept arbitrary boolean expressions, like in...

1 of (true, false)

1 of ($a and not $b, $c, false)

Notice however that we have lost the possibility of using wildcards with rule names. So, this is valid...

1 of (some_rule)

But this is not valid...

1 of (some_rule*)

base64 modifier can't be used with strings shorter than 3 characters

In YARA 4.x you can use the base64 modifier with strings shorter than 3 characters, but this is an error in YARA-X. In the other hand, YARA-X won't produce false positives when the base64 modifiers is used, as it may happen in YARA 4.x in certain cases. This is a well-known YARA 4.x issue described in the documentation:

Because of the way that YARA strips the leading and trailing characters after base64 encoding, one of the base64 encodings of "Dhis program cannow" and "This program cannot" are identical.

base64 and base64wide modifiers can have different alphabets

In YARA 4.x if you use both base64 and base64wide in the same string they must use the same alphabet. If you specify a custom alphabet for base64, you must do the same for base64wide, so this in error:

$a = "foo" base64 base64wide("./ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789")

In YARA-X you can specify different alphabets for base64 and base64wide in the same string. In the example above base64 would use the default alphabet as always, while base64wide would use the custom alphabet.

xor and fullword behave differently when used together

In YARA 4.x the combination xor and fullword looks for the bytes before and after the XORed pattern and makes sure that they are not alphanumeric, so the pattern "mississippi" xor(1) fullword matches {lhrrhrrhqqh}, which is the result of XORing mississippi with 1. The pattern matches because the XORed mississippi is delimited by the non-alphanumeric characters { and }.

In YARA-X the bytes before and after the pattern are also XORed before checking if they are alphanumeric, therefore {lhrrhrrhqqh} becomes zmississippiz, which doesn't match "mississippi" xor(1) fullword. In other words, YARA-X searches for full words contained inside a longer XORed string, which is the intended behavior in most cases.

Jump bounds in hex patterns can be written in hex, octal, etc

In YARA 4.x the following hex pattern is invalid:

{ 01 02 03 [0x00-0x100] 04 05 06 }

This is because the jump's upper and lower bounds can be expressed in base 10 only, 0x00 and 0x100 are not valid bounds. In YARA-X hex and octal values are accepted.

Stricter escaped characters in regular expressions

YARA 4.x accepts invalid escaped characters in regular expressions, and simply treat them as the character itself. For instance, in /foo\gbar/ the \g sequence is not a valid escaped character and YARA translates \g into g, so /foo\gbar/ is equivalent to /foogbar/.

This has proven to be problematic, because it's rarely the desired behaviour and often hides errors in the regular expression. For example, these are real-life patterns where the relaxed policy around escaped characters is backfiring:

/\\x64\Release\\create.pdb/

In the pattern above notice the \R in \Release. The intention was obviously to match \\x64\\Release\\create.pdb/, but the missing "" goes unnoticed and the resulting regular expression is /\\x64Release\\create.pdb/, which is incorrect. Some other examples are:

/%TEMP%\NewGame/

/(debug|release)\eda2.pdb/

/\\AppData\\Roaming\\[0-9]{9,12}\VMwareCplLauncher\.exe/

/To: [^<]*?<[^@]*?@[^>]*?.\gov[^>]*?>/

/[a-z,A-Z]:\\SAM\\clients\\Sam3\\enc\\SAM\obj\\Release\\samsam\.pdb/

YARA 4.4 introduces the --strict-escape argument that turn-on a strict check on escaped characters and return an error in such cases. This is also the default behaviour in YARA-X.