kgardas / msf-haskell

Haskell implementation of Metasploit remote API

MSF-Haskell

Introduction

This directory contains the Haskell Metasploit binding and library as well as a whitepaper describing the purpose and use of the library.

In brief, the Metasploit Framework (MSF) is a widely deployed open source penetration testing platform. Much of the functionality of the framework is provided by a remote procedure call (RPC) interface via the standard HTTP protocol. This is known as the Metasploit Remote API.

Open source bindings to this API already exist in other programming languages. This package is a Haskell implementation of this API so that developers can write Haskell clients that communicate with the Metasploit server.

In addition to a low-level implementation of the API, we provide higher level abstractions to improve the safety of Haskell clients. These abstractions help penetration testers writing Haskell code to avoid certain errors. For instance, there is compile-time support to detect if the developer attempted to launch an exploit against a host that they meant to only port scan. The included whitepaper covers the capabilities of these safety features in more detail.

This binding was compatible with the MSF API as of early 2013, but has not been tested on more recent releases.

Contact

• Isaac Potoczny-Jones [e-mail] @SyntaxPolice
• Trevor Elliott [e-mail]

Directory Contents

In this section, we describe the most important files and directories contained in this package:

Documentation

• whitepaper - This directory contains a PDF and the latex source files for the high-level whitepaper describing the system. This whitepaper outlines the purpose of the library and explains the types of programming errors that can be avoided when using the library. To read the whitepaper, view whitepaper/main.pdf in Adobe Acrobat or another PDF viewer.

Code

• msfHaskell.cabal - The Haskell Cabal is the standard build system for Haskell, similar to tools like Ant for Java. This file is the set of build instructions for this package.

• src - This directory contains the library source files.

• src/RPC - The RPC directory is a low-level implementation of the Metasploit Remote API.

• src/MSF - The MSF directory is a higher-level implementation of the Metasploit Remote API. This builds upon the code in the RPC directory. It includes more advanced features like event handling, port scanning, and improved type safety.

• examples - a directory containing a single example program, which we may extend in the future with more examples.

• examples/ExampleExploit.hs - This program demonstrates many of the features of the API, and uses both the MSF and RPC code. In particular, the example instructs Metasploit to perform an nmap operation, launch an exploit, and download assets like the /etc/passwd files from the target. The exploit in this example uses an old, patched, and publicly known vulnerability (CVE-2007-2447) that is included in the standard open source Metasploit framework.

Building

The library and examples build using the standard Haskell compilation system called Cabal. The system requires GHC, Cabal, and some packages. GHC and Cabal should be installed using your operating system's package manager (e.g. RPM). The package dependencies will be automatically downloaded and installed by the Cabal build system. To build, run "cabal update" and "cabal install" from the top level directory.