From remote shell to remote terminal

If you like exploitation surely you've had your own reverse or connect-back shells. Set up a listening netcat, run the payload and boom: you get a shell back! Then you explore the box, start a program, want to stop it, and do Ctrl-C... no!!! You just lost your shell, because that interrupted netcat, not the remote process.

In this post we'll look at shells and terminals, from the most simple like this netcat with /bin/sh over the network, to a remote terminal emulator supporting terminal window size changes out of band. Think all the goodness SSH is doing for you, could we attempt something like it?

Creating Burp extensions in Python, the "editor" case

Surely you've heard of the Burp Suite, quite useful software to perform security testing of web applications and in general to play with anything that talks HTTP(S). There's even a free edition which is often more than enough since I mostly use just Proxy and Repeater.

You can even write extensions to automate things or support some weird things you might see on top of HTTP. Burp being written in Java, you can write your extensions in Java. They also allow you to write them in Python or Ruby, using Jython or JRuby.

I needed to write an extension recently, in Python since I don't particularly like Java. This post shares my experience and resulting code.

Golang data races to break memory safety

Go is becoming more and more popular as a programming language and getting more scrutiny from a security point of view. You might remember my heap corruption during garbage collection post. A few days ago Scott Piper wrote Looking for security trouble spots in Go code, an interesting read.

I'd like to expand on a topic I've researched a few months ago after discussing with Dmitry Vyukov (ASAN, TSAN, core Go contributor). He mentioned once on the public Go mailing list that you can break the memory safety of Go with data races, and it piqued my interest so we'll explore that in this post with some exploits.

Before I start, it's important to realize that the Go team knows about this: see Russ Cox detailed blog post Off to the Races.

DNS reverse proxy

I have a server with a single IPv4 and I want to run two DNS servers:

• one to serve zones like stalkr.net - if you recall, I like PowerDNS;
• another one for tunneling - I like dns2tcp (TCP level), another good one is iodine (IP level).

Problem: I looked a bit but none of the DNS server software I've seen support forwarding queries that aren't for them to another server. Basically what I need is a reverse proxy that looks at the DNS query, and route it based on the name. It's the same as an HTTP reverse proxy that looks at the Host field to proxy the request to another server. I tried to hack with resolvers and stub/forward zones but it didn't work.

So I made my own dns-reverse-proxy in just a few lines of Go, using a fully featured DNS library. It's running smoothly, if you have the same need feel free to use it!