What is CAPE?

CAPE is an open-source automated malware analysis system.

It’s used to automatically run and analyze files and collect comprehensive analysis results that outline what the malware does while running inside an isolated Windows operating system.

It can retrieve the following type of results:

  • Traces of win32 API calls that were performed by all processes spawned by the malware.

  • Files that were created, deleted, and downloaded by the malware during its execution.

  • Memory dumps of the malware processes.

  • Network traffic trace in PCAP format.

  • Screenshots of Windows desktop taken during the execution of the malware.

  • Full memory dumps of the machines.

Some History

Cuckoo Sandbox started as a Google Summer of Code project in 2010 within The Honeynet Project. It was originally designed and developed by Claudio “nex” Guarnieri, who is still the main developer and coordinates all efforts from joined developers and contributors.

After initial work during the summer of 2010, the first beta release was published on Feb. 5th, 2011, when Cuckoo was publicly announced and distributed for the first time.

In March 2011, Cuckoo had been selected again as a supported project during Google Summer of Code 2011 with The Honeynet Project, during which Dario Fernandes joined the project and extended its functionality.

On November 2nd, 2011, version 0.2 of Cuckoo was released to the public as the first real stable release. In late November 2011, Alessandro “jekil” Tanasi joined the team expanding Cuckoo’s processing and reporting functionality.

In December 2011 Cuckoo v0.3 was released and quickly hit release 0.3.2 in early February.

In late January 2012, we opened Malwr.com, a free and public running Cuckoo Sandbox instance provided with a full-fledged interface through which people could submit files to be analyzed and results were returned.

In March 2012 Cuckoo Sandbox won the first round of the Magnificent7 program organized by Rapid7.

During the Summer of 2012 Jurriaan “skier” Bremer joined the development team, refactoring the Windows analysis component sensibly and improving the analysis’ quality.

On July 24th, 2012, Cuckoo Sandbox 0.4 was released.

On December 20th, 2012, Cuckoo Sandbox 0.5 “To The End Of The World” was released.

On April 15th, 2013, we released Cuckoo Sandbox 0.6, shortly after having launched the second version of Malwr.com.

On August 1st, 2013, Claudio “nex” Guarnieri, Jurriaan “skier” Bremer and Mark “rep” Schloesser presented Mo’ Malware Mo’ Problems - Cuckoo Sandbox to the rescue at Black Hat Las Vegas.

On January 9th, 2014, Cuckoo Sandbox 1.0 was released.

In March 2014, Cuckoo Foundation was born as a non-profit organization dedicated to the growth of Cuckoo Sandbox and the surrounding projects and initiatives.

On April 7th, 2014, Cuckoo Sandbox 1.1 was released.

On November 30th, 2015, Cuckoo-modified was moved to Brad’s repository, which got huge improvements to monitor and other parts of the core system .. _ Cuckoo-modified: https://github.com/spender-sandbox/cuckoo-modified

On September 16th, 2016, CAPE(Configuration And Payload Extraction) was born .. _ CAPE CTXIS: https://github.com/ctxis/CAPE .. _ CAPE upstream: https://github.com/kevoreilly/CAPE

On October 20th, 2019, CAPEv2 Python3 .. _ CAPEv2 upstream: https://github.com/kevoreilly/CAPEv2

Use Cases

CAPE is designed to be used both as a standalone application as well as to be integrated into larger frameworks, thanks to its extremely modular design.

It can be used to analyze:

  • Generic Windows executables

  • DLL files

  • PDF documents

  • Microsoft Office documents

  • URLs and HTML files

  • PHP scripts

  • CPL files

  • Visual Basic (VB) scripts

  • ZIP files

  • Java JAR

  • Python files

  • Almost anything else

Thanks to its modularity and powerful scripting capabilities, there’s no limit to what you can achieve with CAPE!

For more information on customizing CAPE, see the Customization chapter.

Architecture

CAPE Sandbox consists of central management software which handles sample execution and analysis.

Each analysis is launched in a fresh and isolated virtual machine. CAPE’s infrastructure is composed of a Host machine (the management software) and a number of Guest machines (virtual machines for analysis).

The Host runs the core component of the sandbox that manages the whole analysis process, while the Guests are the isolated environments where the malware samples get safely executed and analyzed.

The following picture explains CAPE’s main architecture:

../_images/architecture-main.png

The recommended setup is GNU/Linux (Ubuntu LTS preferably) as the Host and Windows 7 as a Guest.

Obtaining CAPE

CAPE can be downloaded from the official git repository, where the stable and packaged releases are distributed or can be cloned from our official git repository.

Warning

It is very likely that documentation is not up-to-date, but for that we try to keep a changelog.