joe_v

That makes sense, something like `grep $USER /etc/passwd` would shuffle the whole passwd file over the wire, etc; for a lot of post-exploitation stuff I could see it causing more trouble than it's worth.

Apologies it's a little scattered. Roughly it's about dealing with situations where you can execute a command but now want to run a native executable, and how much noise such a thing will make in the presence of monitoring.

> Couldn't you create a temporary file in-memory (e.g. in /dev/shm or in some tmpfs), make it executable (+x) and then execute it?

It all depends on how your environment is set up: whether a tmpfs or shm device is mounted and writable by your user is up to the admin. For example, on many embedded devices you often want to avoid writes to prevent any sort of filesystem wear, or because you have a write-once media like a ROM; so the whole fs will be mounted readonly. With chroots it's best practice to provide a minimal environment - unless tempfiles are needed there will usually not be a /tmp. Try `docker run --read-only -ti ubuntu bash` as another example:

``` root@9302f159e0e0:/tmp# touch a touch: cannot touch 'a': Read-only file system ```

That is a really useful implementation and a good way to use gdb to "live off the land". It is interesting how ops changes like moving to containers/VMs affect pentesting techniques; over the last decade I find myself relying less and less on live-off-the-land in a lot of engagements. When you can use them though they have a lot of advantages.

Also never realized that others have implemented (and I guess patented?) syscall proxying, I have heard that idea discussed before for offensive tooling and wondered how well it works in practice.

Hah! I was just referencing this paper the other day when mucking with the linker for an unrelated reason. I probably should have chosen a better name for my article - I am trying to cover the cases of "you have Linux command execution, how do you run native code?" as opposed to your approach which as I understand is more: "you are running native code, how can you load a separate ELF in-process?"

Agreed about institutional memory; zines/blogs are very important; but at the end of the day I usually end up just asking in some corner of IRC.