krabsetw

Overview

krabsetw is a C++ library that simplifies interacting with ETW. It allows for any number of traces and providers to be enabled and for client code to register for event notifications from these traces.

krabsetw also provides code to simplify parsing generic event data into strongly typed data types.

Microsoft.O365.Security.Native.ETW is a C++ CLI (.NET) wrapper around krabsetw. It provides the same functionality as krabsetw to .NET applications and is used in production by the Office 365 Security team. It's affectionately referred to as Lobsters.

Examples & Documentation

• An ETW Primer.
• Simple examples can be found in the examples folder.
• Please refer to KrabsExample.md and LobstersExample.md for detailed examples.
• SampleKrabsCSharpExe is a non-trivial example demonstrating how to manage the trace objects.
• Using Message Analyzer to find new ETW event sources.

Important Notes

• krabsetw and Microsoft.O365.Security.Native.ETW only support x64 and ARM64. No effort has been made to support x86.
• krabsetw and Microsoft.O365.Security.Native.ETW are only supported on Windows 7 or Windows 2008R2 machines and above.
• Throwing exceptions in the event handler callback or krabsetw or Microsoft.O365.Security.Native.ETW will cause the trace to stop processing events.
• The call to "start" on the trace object is blocking so thread management may be necessary.
• The Visual Studio solution is krabs\krabs.sln.
• When building a native code binary using the krabsetw package, please refer to the compilation readme for notes about the TYPEASSERT and NDEBUG compilation flags.

NuGet Packages

NuGet packages are available both for the krabsetw C++ headers and the Microsoft.O365.Security.Native.ETW .NET library:

• https://www.nuget.org/packages/Microsoft.O365.Security.Native.ETW/
• https://www.nuget.org/packages/Microsoft.O365.Security.Native.ETW.Debug/ (for development - provides type asserts)
• https://www.nuget.org/packages/Microsoft.O365.Security.Krabsetw/

For verifying the .NET binaries, you can use the following command: sn -T Microsoft.O365.Security.Native.ETW.dll

The expected output is:

Microsoft (R) .NET Framework Strong Name Utility  Version 4.0.30319.0
Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation.  All rights reserved.

Public key token is 31bf3856ad364e35

Community & Contact

Please feel free to file issues through GitHub for bugs and feature requests and we'll respond to them as quickly as we're able.