Environment variables for HIPS Rules

[Nono 3]

Dear Community,

I can't find anywhere a clear explanation about the Environment Variables we may use for HIPS rules to specify the path of an application.

According to https://help.eset.com/ees/6.6/en-US/index.html?idh_exclude_format.htm it seems that this list of var. should work:

%ALLUSERSPROFILE%
%COMMONPROGRAMFILES%
%COMMONPROGRAMFILES(X86)%
%COMSPEC%
%HOMEDRIVE%
%HOMEPATH%
%PROGRAMFILES%
%PROGRAMFILES(X86)%
%SystemDrive%
%SystemRoot%
%WINDIR%
%PUBLIC%

Then, according to https://help.eset.com/ees/6.6/en-US/index.html?idh_hips_editor_single_rule.htm it seems that we should be able to use the wildcard like this:

For example HKEY_USERS\*\software can mean 
HKEY_USER\.default\software <= I guess the missing "S" in KHEY_USERS is a typo ?
but not HKEY_USERS\S-1-2-21-2928335913-73762274-491795397-7895\.default\software. 

What I want to achieve is to specify this application path (knowing that the username may change among my devices) :

C:\Users\user22\AppData\Local\Apps.exe

Here are the generic path I tried to use (but doesn't work, and give me the warning "User rules file contains invalid data" without any deeper explanation ) :

1. %HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH%\AppData\Local\Apps.exe
2. C:%HOMEPATH%\AppData\Local\Apps.exe
3. C:\Users\*\AppData\Local\Apps.exe 

Ideally, I would like to be able to use (any) environment (user OR system) variables like : %LOCALAPPDATA% but it also failed.

Any suggestion would be very much appreciated !

Thanks in advance for your time.

Edited June 11, 2018 by Nono

[Marcos 5,252]

Thanks for the heads-up. I assume the author of the help meant "HKEY_CURRENT_USER" instead of "HKEY_USER". We'll rewrite that part of the help.

Currently wildcards (asterisk) can only be used in registry paths, e.g. HKEY_USERS\*\Software\Policies. As for using variables, only system variables will work since ekrn.exe runs in the local system account and therefore has no visibility into user variables.

 

[Nono 3]

Thanks Marcos,

I manage to make it works ... somehow ... and without having the issue, but it's not really nice, especially for a multi-language computer park. (for instance, C:\Users\ can become C:\Utilisateurs\ or C:\Benutzer\ depending of the system language.)

I used this format : C:\Users\\AppData\Local\Apps.exe => Notice the \\ after Users\ (I basically just removed the *)

But as "%LOCALAPPDATA%" is indeed a system variable do you know why it doesn't work at all ? (the rules isn't triggered AND there is no error).

Same question, why the 1st rule doesn't work as it included both variable avail. on https://help.eset.com/ees/6.6/en-US/index.html?idh_exclude_format.htm ?

 

As you may understand, wildcard is very common for files as well as registry. Do you know when it would works or how to check if a system variable will work on eset or not (the %localappdata% would be very much appreciate).