full-disclosure - exploit frameworks

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Date: Fri Sep 30 08:22:02 2005
From: dave at immunitysec.com (Dave Aitel)
Subject: exploit frameworks

There's additional value to an exploit framework for many penetration 
testing specialists: being able to write exploits faster sometimes makes 
it possible to impress clients with a shell, rather than simply showing 
them a POC crash. Having good shellcode libraries for various platforms 
is a nice side effect of a GUI-hacking-tool that most people don't take 
advantage of, but for the experts, can really come in handy. This is 
true even within the Immunity team: having everyone able to use the heap 
API's Nico creates makes us all better.

Realistically, most people who write exploits have their own library of 
tools - but there's always that first time when they think "Hey, I don't 
want to write a shellcode decoder for PPC today." and then they use 
CANVAS and if it works out, they warm up to having someone else do the 
grunt work for them so they can concentrate on exploiting whatever bug 
it is they're working on.

Frameworks are just that: things you build on top of. Some people build 
0days, and for others, it's automation scripts that are custom to 
whatever client they're working on. But it's still down to the actual 
skill you bring to the table.

As a side note, having all your exploits in one API makes you able to do 
certain transformations on them. I released a presentation delivered at 
HITB yesterday here that demonstrates some other advantages relating to 
that:
http://www.immunityinc.com/downloads/nematodes.sxi

-dave

Bernhard Mueller wrote:
>          
> i agree with this. it's often much easier to find a bug than to exploit
> it (see strange heap overflows and the like), and i also don't have the
> time to spend days on disassembling and looking for attack vectors (and
> i'm sure that other people will have more fun doing just that).
> what i criticize is that *lots* of companies (at least here in my
> vicinity) are selling cheap "vulnerability assessments" which actually
> are nothing more than automated security scans. this leads to the
> customer feeling safe when he's really wide open to attacks. often,
> these people's networks can be rooted in no time.
> sure, you don't have to be uber-31337 to do penetration tests (i'm
> certainly not), but it should definitely go beyond the
> "scan--+--google-for-exploit" approach.
>
> regards,
>
>