What is PPID spoofing and how it enables red team trade-craft?
Learn what is parent process ID (PPID) spoofing and how to use it for red team trade-craft.
Imagine you're applying for a job, and the employer requires references. Normally, they would contact your previous employer to verify your background. However, if you don’t want them to find out your real history, you provide a fake reference who vouches for you. The company sees that your reference appears legitimate, even though it's a deception. Similarly, in PPID Spoofing, a process pretends to have been spawned by a legitimate parent, misleading security solutions into believing that it is benign.
Parent Process ID (PPID) Spoofing is a technique used to manipulate the parent-child relationship between processes in Windows. Normally, when a process is created, it inherits the Parent Process ID (PPID) from the process that spawned it. However, a red team operator can modify this behavior to create a process that appears to be spawned by a legitimate parent, thus evading detection from security solutions that rely on process lineage analysis.
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By default, security tools monitor process hierarchies to detect suspicious activities, such as malware spawning from non-standard parent processes (e.g., cmd.exe being launched from notepad.exe). PPID Spoofing allows red team operators to bypass these detection mechanisms by forging a legitimate parent process, such as explorer.exe, to make their malicious process blend into normal system activity.
PPID Spoofing is achieved by setting the PROC_THREAD_ATTRIBUTE_PARENT_PROCESS attribute. This allows the red team operator to specify an arbitrary parent process instead of inheriting the real parent. The flow for PPID spoofing is as follows:
Open a handle to the target parent process - The red team operator must first obtain a handle to a legitimate parent process (e.g.,
explorer.exe), usually withPROCESS_CREATE_PROCESSaccess rights.Initialize the STARTUPINFOEX structure - This structure is an extended version of
STARTUPINFOand allows the specification of advanced process creation attributes.Set the PPID attribute - The
PROC_THREAD_ATTRIBUTE_PARENT_PROCESSattribute is set usingUpdateProcThreadAttribute(), linking the new process to the chosen parent.Create the new process with the spoofed parent - The malicious process is created using
CreateProcess(), inheriting the spoofed PPID rather than the actual one.
Red Team Notes
- PPID Spoofing is a technique that allows a process to appear as if it was spawned by a different parent, bypassing security detections based on process lineage. This is achieved using the CreateProcess API with PROC_THREAD_ATTRIBUTE_PARENT_PROCESS to assign a chosen parent process.Follow my journey of 100 Days of Red Team on WhatsApp, Telegram or Discord.
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