Dll Kernel32.dll
Shay Silvertooth
Calls made to kernel32.dll for string conversion between ASCII and Unicode and that forces application builder to include kernel32.dll into support folder. I seem to be unable to exclude kernel32.dll from being added. Next, application installer will pick up the kernel32.dll. If I try to delete it prior to creating installer, it will detect missing file and will not build. So, letting installer to copy kernel32.dll on a target PC seems strange, but works if both LabVIEW development PC and target PC have same Windows flavors and both 32-bit. The real trouble starts when 32-bit kernel32.dll is copied on 64-bit Windows 7. Then application will crash before it loads. The workaround, of course, is to manually delete 32-bit kernel32.dll that was placed there by installer.
Is there way to tweak application builder so that it will not automatically include a copy of kernel32.dll and let my application to use the one from Windows on target machine?
Is there other library I could use for Unicode in LabVIEW that is not married to kernel32.dll?
Make sure that any Call Library Node that accesses a kernel32.dll function, only contains the DLL name without any path information. The "Library Name or Path" being a name only tells the application builder to treat the DLL as system preinstalled and not copy it as a private DLL into the application build. This is actually also documented in the Online Help to the Call Library Node.
I have just come across the same problem when building a LabVIEW 2015 application that uses Unicode string display in captions. I have found that a LabVIEW subVI called "STR_ASCII-Unicode.vi" called by "Open Registry Key.vi" contains a call to the function MultiByteToWideChar in kernel32.dll, but uses the full absolute path to the DLL. Another function call in the same VI to "getACP" does not. Editing the function call in this VI and rebuilding the application no longer places a copy of kernel32.dll in the support folder.
Errors related to kernel32.dll can arise for a few different different reasons. For instance, a faulty application, kernel32.dll has been deleted or misplaced, corrupted by malicious software present on your PC or a damaged Windows registry.
In the vast majority of cases, the solution is to properly reinstall kernel32.dll on your PC, to the Windows system folder. Alternatively, some programs, notably PC games, require that the DLL file is placed in the game/application installation folder.
Errors arise when other applications in "Windows" are trying to access the protected memory space that Kernel32.dll is using. These kind of errors can occur in all "Microsoft Windows" operating systems from "Windows 95" to the new "Windows 7".
Lots of people having issues with latest Skype update these days. The error message concerns Kernel32.dllNote: Do NOT attempt to change this .dll on your computer. This is not the issue. The problem is that Skype have stopped support Win XP SP2 and older. You need to update to XP SP3 from Microsoft help center then possibly reinstall Skype again.Do note: Microsoft themselves will stop support this XP from April 2014 onwards, and so will lots of other software vendors.Hope it helps!
Hi! I used to use Skype for a long time without problems. But recently I have received notification on updating the program. So after updating of Skype, the latter doesn't run. Only notification "Fatal Error" with short description "Failed to get proc address for SetDllDirectoryW (Kernel32.dll)" is appeared.
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Thanks to Dependency Walker, I figured out that the problem could come from kernel32.dll. A lot of its dependencies from Windows API (as I understood) are missing or not found, as you can see on the screenshot below:
Before we start dealing with the Shellcoding part, I would suggest having a strong hand in C to understand how memory works, coz everything we will be doing would be in-memory. Knowing the windows data-types like LPWSTR, LPSTR and others would be a boon since that will get you to understand that:
Next, the sole important things to know would be basic Assembly x86. ASM is by default the same either in Linux or Windows, except for the syscalls or API calls. So, knowing how registers work is primarily important.
In the above image, I have created two variables compName and compNameSize. These will be the arguments provided to the function GetComputerNameA. Remember that there are two similar functions GetComputerNameA and GetComputerNameW. The W stands for Wide Unicode characters, whereas A stands for ANSI CHAR strings. We will be using the ANSI throughout the blog series. So, below is what MSDN has to say about the GetComputerNameA function:
Remember when I said in the beginning that Kernel32.dll, NTDLL.DLL and Kernelbase.dll is loaded in every exe? Yes! The truth is that these DLLs are a pretty important part of the Operating system and these are loaded every time anything is executed. Thus, the loading order of these DLLs into memory is always going to be the same. This may however differ from OS to OS meaning it may be different in XP and may be different in Windows 10, but the loading order will stay the same across all Windows 10 versions.
Our main interest here is in PEB struct (known as LDR) since this is where all the information related to a process gets loaded. Everything from process arguments to process ID gets stored in here. Within PEB, there is a struct called as PEB_LDR_DATA which contains three important things. These are called Linked Lists.
Once you load an exe within windbg, it will show you some output. As for now we will ignore the output and type .cls in the command prompt below to clear the screen and start afresh. Now, type !peb within the command prompt and see what we get here:
Effectively, once our last instruction is run, it should load up the address of Kernel32.dll in the EAX register. and you can check the same in x32dbg as well as in windbg using the lm command: 74F50000 which is the address of Kernel32.dll.
Now that we have the address of kernel32.dll, the next step is to find the address of GetComputerNameA using LoadLibraryA and call the function. Unfortunately, this blog has grown too big and I will have to continue this in my next post. In the next post, we will be completing our full ASM code for fetching the computer name and printing it on screen and then the shellcode part.
It was literally the day after I cracked the __FILE__ determinism bug that I hit a completely different build determinism issue. I was asked to investigate why the Chrome build number reported for Chrome crashes on Windows 11 was lagging behind what was reported by winver. For example, Chrome crashes on 10.0.22000.376 were being reported as happening on 10.0.22000.318. After some code spelunking I found that crashpad retrieves the Windows version number from kernel32.dll, so I focused on that.
Aside: crashpad grabs the Windows version number from kernel32.dll instead of using GetVersionExW (which is deprecated, BTW) because the GetVersion* functions will frequently lie about the Windows version for compatibility reasons. For crash reporting we really want the actual-no-lies-we-can-handle-the-truth version number, and kernel32.dll used to be the best way to get this.
Then things got weirder. For some reason I looked at the crash dump on a different machine and the results were different. Now kernel32.dll was being reported as version .318 and .347. How can the same crash dump be reporting different version information? I was starting to feel a bit unhinged, and was starting to think I should resurrect my original plan of going to circus school.
A minidump records the minimum information needed in order to diagnose a crash. This includes the contents of the stacks from all threads, a few hundred bytes of memory from wherever registers are pointing, information about all loaded and unloaded modules, and a few other snippets. In all cases the idea is to record as little information as possible while still being able to accurately reproduce as much process state as possible. Some memory (most heap memory and global variables) are not recorded, but it is okay to have some information omitted. It is not, however, okay to have some information which is incorrect.
The minidump only records minimal information about the loaded modules, but a crash-dump analyst wants to be able to load symbols, disassemble all functions, etc., and that is where symbol servers come in. The minidump records enough information about loaded modules (a few hundred bytes) to contain the crucial identifiers which allow the debugger to download the full DLL or EXE and the PDB from the symbol servers where Microsoft and Chrome publish their DLLs, EXEs, and PDBs.
Apparently the memory saved in the minidump contains the first version number displayed by windbg for kernel32.dll, so it is consistent. But the second version number comes from the copy of kernel32.dll downloaded from the symbol server, and that was inconsistent.
So, the technical explanation is simple enough, but the design question is perplexing. It seems to me that a fundamental tenet of symbol servers is that the symbol server identifier uniquely identifies a particular file. Once you break that assumption all bets are off. I am saddened that Microsoft has decided to do this, and I hope that they fix this bug. The whole concepts of minidumps and symbol servers is on shaky ground until this is addressed.
The initial crashpad bug, wherein the wrong OS version was being reported in crashes, was fixed after some discussion with Microsoft (probably on twitter) to read the current OS version from the registry. At some point the same issue should be fixed in Chromium itself.
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