PPLKiller

Tool to bypass LSA Protection (aka Protected Process Light)

I’ve noticed there is a common misconception that LSA Protection prevents attacks that leverage SeDebug or Administrative privileges to extract credential material from memory, like Mimikatz. LSA Protection does NOT protect from these attacks, at best it makes them slightly more difficult as an extra step needs to be performed.

Usage and Demo

1. Open PPLKiller.sln with Visual Studio 2019 and build a Release binary which will be saved in PPLKiller\x64\Release\PPLKiller.exe
2. You'll always want to run PPLKiller.exe /installDriver first to install the driver
3. Run an attack like PPLKiller.exe /disableLSAProtection
4. Cleanup with PPLKiller.exe /uninstallDriver

Video Usage

Mitigations

• Use Credential Guard which uses virtualization-based security. This would prevent PPLKiller and PPLdump.
• Use a Microsoft Defender Application Control kernel-mode code integrity policy to restrict which drivers can be loaded. The tool PPLdump, which can disable LSA Protection without loading a driver, could still be used.