mandiant / mandiant/capa

Extract indicators (HBI/NBI) around capability detections

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dynamic enhancement
Dominant language
Python
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Avg merge
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Merged PRs (30d)
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Description

Capabilities often have associated host-based and network-based indicators (HBIs and NBIs). Especially these examples (by rule namespaces) come to mind:
- `communication/http`: IPs, domains
- `host-interaction/file-system`: file names
- `host-interaction/registry`: registry keys and values

We often encounter an HBI or NBI as a string used close around a capability, e.g. as argument to an API call.

It would be worth exploring if we can automatically:
- extract strings potentially related to capabilities
- perform some sanity checks on them (e.g., is it an IP? or is it a file path?)
- output them with the capabilities (e.g. as part of our existing rendering or in a new section highlighting potential indicators)

I suspect this could work very well with in the dynamic analysis flavor, but also for static extraction on basic samples could work quite well.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by surveying how capa performs static and dynamic capability extraction and how existing capability results are rendered. Define which nearby strings qualify as potential HBIs or NBIs and which sanity checks apply to IPs, domains, file names, registry keys, and values. Done means the scope, output location, and validation behavior are specified for both analysis flavors.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
python
Domain
reverse-engineering, security
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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