Category: backdoorfactory

Using Binject

Binject is a sweet multipart library, making up several tools for code-caving and backdooring binaries via golang. The project was originally inspired as a rewrite of the backdoor factory in go and now that it’s functional this post will show you how to use it. In this post we are going to explore how you can use the library operationally for a number of tasks. We will start with an example of using some of the command line tools included with the project for the arbitrary backdooring of files. Next we will look at using the library to backdoor a file programmatically. Finally we will use the bdf caplet with bettercap to backdoor some binaries being transmitted on the network, on-the-fly. I want to give a shout out to the homie Vyrus, as a lot of this was inspired by him but in non-public projects, so I can’t link to his stuff. I also want to give a shoutout to Awgh, as he’s been an awesome mentor and powerhouse in implementing a lot of the Binject features. Below you can see the binjection command line tool being used to backdoor an arbitrary windows PE, on Linux. In the next section we will explore some of the command line features of Binject.

Using the command line tools included with Binject is pretty straightforward; the main library Binject/binjection contains a command line interface tool that exposes all of the existing functionality for backdooring files on macOS, Windows, and Linux. Above we can see go-donut being used to turn a gscript program into position independent shellcode, then we use the binjection command line tool to backdoor a Windows PE (a .exe file), all on a Linux OS. The binjection cli tool takes 3 main command line flags, “-f” to specify the target file to backdoor, “-s” to specify a file containing your shellcode in a raw bytecode format, and “-o” specifying where to write your new backdoor file. Optionally you can give a “-l” to write the output to a logfile instead of standard out. You can also specify the injection method to use, although the tool only supports a very limited and mostly default set currently. The binjection cli tool will automatically detect the executable type and backdoor it accordingly. Another library and command line tool included with the framework is Binject/go-donut, which is essentially just a port of TheWover/donut. We can see this being used above to prepare another program to be embedded in our target executable. I really like both of these command line tools because it’s easy to cross compile them for linux or macOS, giving me a really convenient way to generate my target shellcode regardless of what OS I’m operating from. Having the entire tool chain in go allows me to easily move my tools to whatever operating system or use them all together in the same codebase. Even if you’re not familiar with go, you can just as easily compile the cli tools and script them together with something like bash or powershell. Below we can see the binjection cli tool being used to backdoor ELF executables on Linux.

Using binjection programmatically as a go library is also super simple and arguably far more useful because you can now integrate it into so many more projects. The library calls are just as straight forward, basically a single function call depending on the binary type your backdooring. Here we can see it as a standalone example for others to use. We can also see it being implemented here for Windows in Sliver, a golang based c2 framework with tons of features. We can also use binjection in gscript, although it requires this embarrassingly small shim interface. This is insanely powerful functionality to be able to ship in an implant binary, as the implant can now backdoor, already persisted, legitimate binaries on the target system. You can even break down the supporting libraries and use other parts of Binject, like Binject/debug, as a triage tool, which we demonstrate with bintriage. Finally, to bring the project full circle, Binject has been integrated with bettercap for the on-the-fly backdooring of files on the network. It currently accomplishes this using bettercap’s ARP spoofing module, the network proxy module, and a helper tool to manage the file queue, making the whole process really clean. Using the integration is easy with the Binject/backdoorfactory helper tool. Simply follow these usage instructions, which just involves installing all of the necessary prerequisite tools, and then Binject/backdoorfactory will spit out the caplet and command you need you need for bettercap. You can see a demo of all of this together in the video at the end. So now you have a pretty good idea of some different ways you can use Binject. We also encourage people to submit pull requests to the library with new injection methods or even further enumerating the executable types. There is still a lot of work to be done here but you can use the library currently to great effect.

Back to the Backdoor Factory

backdoorfactory setting up the man-in-the-middle with bettercap and injecting a binary inside of a tar.gz as it’s being downloaded by wget (courtesy of sblip)

Backdoor Factory documentation

Backdoor Factory source code

About six years ago, during a conversation with a red teamer friend of mine, I received “The Look”. You know the look I’m talking about. It’s the one that keeps you reading every PoC and threat feed and hacker blog trying to avoid. That look that says “What rock have you been under, buddy? Literally everyone already knows about this.”

In this case, my transgression was my ignorance of The Backdoor Factory.

The Backdoor Factory was released by Josh Pitts in 2013 and took the red teaming world by storm. It let you set up a network man-in-the-middle attack using ettercap and then intercept any files downloaded over the web and inject platform-appropriate shellcode into them automatically.

Man-in-the-Middle Attack Using ARP Spoofing

In the days before binary signing was widely enforced and wifi security was even worse than it is now, this was BALLER. People were using this right and left to intercept installer downloads, pop boxes, and get on corpnet (via wifi) or escalate (via ARP). It was like a rap video, or that scene in Goodfellas before the shit hits the fan.

But nothing lasts forever. Operating systems made some subtle changes and entropy took over, and so the age of The Backdoor Factory came to an end. Some time later, the thing actually stopped working and red teamers sadly packed up their shit and lumbered off to the fields of Jenkins.

Fear not, gentle reader, for our tale does not end here.

For some reason, a year and change back, I found myself once again needing something very much like The Backdoor Factory and stumbled on this “end of support” announcement. Perhaps still motivated by my shameful ignorance years ago, I thought “maybe I owe this thing something for all the good times” and took a look into the code to see if something could be fixed easily.

No, no it couldn’t. Not at all. But the general design and the vast majority of the logic was all in there. It worked alongside ettercap to do ARP spoofing, then intercepted file downloads, determined what format they were, selected an appropriate shellcode if one was available, and then had a bunch of different configurable methods to inject shellcode into all binary formats.

…It’s just that it was heaps and heaps of prototype-grade Python and byte-banged files. I have heard a rumor, similar to On The Road, that the original version had been written in a single night. It clearly was going to take longer than that to port this to something maintainable, but… I mean… automatic backdooring of downloaded files! This needed to happen. This needed to be a capability that red teamers just had available in the future. Fuck entropy.

Around this time, I pitched the idea of an end-to-end rewrite to some others and we started a little group of enthusiasts.

For each of the abstract areas of functionality from the original, we made a separate Go library. The shellcode repository functions went into shellcode. The logic that handles how to inject shellcode into different binary formats went into binjection. To replace the binary parsing and writing logic, we forked the standard Golang debug library, which already parsed all binary formats, and we simply added the ability to write modified files back out.

This gives us a powerful tool to write binary analysis and modification programs in Go. All of these components work together to re-implement the original functionality of BDF, but since they’ve been broken into separate libraries, they can be re-used in other programs easily.

Finally, to replace the ailing ettercap, we used bettercap, the new Golang replacement, which supports both ARP spoofing and DNS poisoning attacks. bettercap allows for extension “caplet” scripts using an embedded Javascript interpreter, so we wrote the Binject caplet that intercepts file downloads and sends them to our local backdoorfactory service for injection via a named pipe and then passes the injected files along to the original downloader.

The flow of a file through the components of the Backdoor Factory, on its journey to infection

Injection methods have been updated to work on current OS versions for Mach-O, PE, and ELF formats, and will be much easier to maintain in the future, since they’re now written to an abstract “binary manipulation” API.

To put a little extra flair on it, we’ve added the ability to intercept archives being downloaded, decompress them on the fly, inject shellcode into any binaries inside, recompress them, and send them on. Just cuz. In the future, we’re planning on adding some extra logic to bypass signature checks on certain types of files and some other special handlers for things like RPMs.

Now you will have to provide your own shellcode, backdoorfactory only ships with some test code, but if you’re targeting Windows, I’ve also ported the Donut loader to Golang, so you can use go-donut to convert any existing Windows binary (EXE/DLL/.NET/native) to an injectable, encrypted shellcode. It even has remote stager capabilities.

We fully intend to get into a lot more detail about how to use Donut and BDF in future posts, but don’t wait for us to get it together for some vaporware future blog post that may never come… You can try it yourself right now!