Thanks!
Zach
ORIGINAL POST:
I'm proud to announce the open source release of a project I've been working on since January called Crossbow.
Vulnerability research on embedded systems, particularly MIPS Linux systems, is an underserved area. Other targets such as x86 desktop systems and ARM smartphones and tablets have a wealth of tools and techniques readily available to the researcher. In the past year and a half as I've been doing more and more research on embedded devices and developing exploits for them, I've had to roll a bunch of my own code whenever I needed something that wasn't already available. I began to realize that I should probably pull all these things together into a single project to help with exploit development.
Crossbow is that project. Why "Crossbow"? Mainly because I thought it sounded cool. But also because I wanted the name to evoke the image of an offensive tool that is lightweight and uncomplicated.
At Tactical Network Solutions, we don't generally use the defacto standard Metasploit Framework for exploit development. This is for a variety of reasons. Among them is that we mostly code in Python. The tools, libraries, frameworks, etc. that we've all developed internally are mostly in Python. Plus, the vulnerability research community has really crystalized around Python as a research and development language, so there are a ton of external resources in that language. Point is, we'd like to stick with Python if we can.
Also, MSF provides a whole lot that we don't need but not very much that we do need. We wanted something useful but lightweight. You can install Crossbow on your development system, or just stick it right in the source tree of your exploit code. Whatever. It's all good.
So this is the motivation behind Crossbow: Python code that eases the development of exploits, plays nice with our other stuff built in Python, and doesn't provide a ton of stuff we don't really need.
To be clear, Crossbow is to aid in the development of exploits. It's not an exploitation framework or pen-test tool in and of itself. I don't envision packaging actual exploit code with it. Its purpose is to abstract some of the tedious details of exploit development such as encoders, payloads, building a ROP chain, etc.
I hope to post a few tutorials in the next few days on using Crossbow to develop exploits against embedded systems.
Please try it out and let me know what you think. If you'd like to add features or fix bugs (and I really, REALLY hope you do), clone my repo and send me a pull request.
Cheers and keep up the hacking.
