A small but brave and growing collection of advice, links and observations regarding reverse engineering using IDA Pro.

COM - Component Object Model

https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/13601/COM-in-plain-C

• one of the best articles I have read. I highly recommend it

https://reverseengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/13282/ida-pro-list-com-methods

• a very informative thread

http://bytepointer.com/resources/index.htm

• a very interesting site. Highly recommend all the articles regarding COM

http://www.moserware.com/2008/01/finally-understanding-com-after.html

• interesting article with references to other good links for understanding COM

http://www.moserware.com/2009/04/using-obscure-windows-com-apis-in-net.html

• interesting article referenced in the previous recommendation

COM functions reside in ole32.dll C:\Windows\System32\ole32.dll

More information regarding COM can be found everywhere since it is as old as me.

• IDA Pro 😄
• Win32 Python COM module
• RCE COM Tools library
• Microsoft OLE-COM Object Viewer
  • the binary comes when the Windows SDK. On my machine, I found the binary as follows (path and sample MD5 hash):

C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\bin\10.0.17134.0\arm64\oleview.exe - dd683d280b74d2cc2e6a31a574ac6da0
C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\bin\10.0.17134.0\x64\oleview.exe   - 3cec2bf41e410926f62e189bef547d30
C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\bin\10.0.17134.0\x86\oleview.exe   - 0eeccd530de75c398329a1ba0194614f

As ashamed as I am, I must admit I originally did not know in what type library (if any) I could find the IDA structures relating to COM.

First I used IDA's load header feature to load headers such as guiddef.h. The files are originally found when installing the Windows SDK (in my case there were in C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\Include\10.0.17134.0). Initially I found most of my required headers, online, here for example.

A second attempt was as to create an IDA .til file. Not knowing all the header files I would need I parsed the 133 functions pages displayed here: MSDN list of functions that are provided by COM. to find out that all the functions were exported by:

Callobj.h
Combaseapi.h
GuidDef.h
Messagedispatcherapi.h
Objbase.h
Ole2.h
Olectl.h
ROApi.h
Urlmon.h

witch I subsequently collected from the SDK in order to build into the .til. At this point I realised the types were probabil in a visual studio type library, something that IDA has.

The type library I was looking for was: vc9 - Visual Studio v9 headers (without windows.h) The header files are also found in vc6win - Visual C++ but with a different flavor.

One could have used something similar to for /R %i in (*.til) do (tilib.exe -lc "%i" | grep GUID -c | grep -v 0) to find any referenced target structures, but where would the reverse engineering fun in that be?

After loading the type library and doing a type change, such beauty beholds, an example:

Haven't found many.

• https://github.com/noobdoesre/py-com-tools

IDA already comes with:

• Dieter Spaar's COM Interface Plugin

• Class Informer plugin by Sirmabus that can help reconstruct RTTI information for your COM object. It requires IDA Pro 6.9 or greater.