ATA-based DMA-attacking PoC tool written in Rust

This PoC is modified from ddma by btbd. Both the CLI-tool and the Windows driver are written in Rust.

OS: Any Windows with x64 support. This project does not use new kernel APIs so it should be able to run on any x64 Windows.
The system must have at least one SATA disk.

IMPORTANT: You are required to install the nightly version of Rust toolchain, since WDK for Rust is only available as nightly!

To build the caller program, use the standard way to build a Rust program:

cargo build

To build the driver program, you need the following pre-requisites:

• Mount EWDK11 with VS Build Tools 17.8.6 to V: drive.
• Install LLVM 17.0.6. Microsoft says LLVM18 has certain bugs.
• Install pefile pip module. This is required for patching the entry point.

Then start building.

cd atadma-drv
V:\LaunchBuildEnv.bat
make

If this is your first time building the driver, make sure your console is under Administrator privilege. The cargo will have to build the WDK crates for you.

Note that the atadma_drv_fixed.sys is the final driver file you will be using.

Install the driver in Administrator privilege:

sc create atadma type= kernel binPath= <Path to driver file> DisplayName=atadma
sc start atadma

Note that this command does not install the driver permanantly. You need to restart after system reboot. sc start atadma is good enough.

Warning: This program will write to the first 8 sectors of a disk. Hence, if the system crashes while this PoC is in DMA operation, your disk head will be destroyed. ONLY YOU WILL BE RESPONSIBLE FOR POTENTIAL DATA LOSSES!
In other words, YOU MUST AT LEAST BACKUP THE FIRST EIGHT SECTORS OF YOUR DISK!.
For virtual machines, you may simply use snapshots.

Then execute the program. It does not require Administrator privilege and can be placed anywhere.

atadma-rs <command> <address>

To unload the driver:

sc stop atadma
sc delete atadma

The println! macro provided by WDK crate will actually call DbgPrint. Therefore, to see debug outputs on debugger, execute the following command in WinDbg:

ed nt!Kd_DEFAULT_Mask f

If you need to make this setting permanent, you will need to modify debugee's registry:

reg add "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Debug Print Filter" /v "DEFAULT" /t REG_DWORD /d 15 /f

There are four commands:

• read command can be used to read any kernel virtual address.
• readphys command can be used to read any physical address.
• write and writephys are reserved unimplemented commands.

The address must be specified in hexadecimal, case-insensitive, and without 0x prefix.

This PoC exploits the DMA capability from AHCI controllers by purposefully specifying DMA Flag in ATA_PASS_THROUGH_DIRECT structure to transfer data between disk and data.
Simply put, this PoC will write content into the disk then read from the disk in order to perform the DMA attack.

Writing to protected memory means reading from disk and specify the destination to be the protected memory.
Reading from protected memory means writing to disk and specify the source to be the protected memory.

This repository is licensed under the MIT License.