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The Metasploit Project is an open source computer security project which provides information about security vulnerabilities and aids in penetration testing and IDS signature development. Its most well-known sub-project is the Metasploit Framework, a tool for developing and executing exploit code against a remote target machine. Other important sub-projects include the Opcode Database, shellcode archive, and security research.
The Metasploit Framework is most notably known for releasing some of the most technically sophisticated exploits to public security vulnerabilities, rather than the most recent. In addition it is a powerful tool for 3rd party security researchers to investigate potential vulnerabilities.
Like comparable commercial products such as Immunity's CANVAS or Core Security Technology's Core Impact, Metasploit can be used by administrators to test the vulnerability of computer systems in order to protect them, or by Black Hat hackers and script kiddies to break into remote systems. Indeed, the Metasploit framework facilitates the latter task considerably.
Metasploit Framework
The basic steps for exploiting a system using the Framework include
- choosing and configuring an exploit (code that enters a target system by taking advantage of one of its bugs; about 100 different exploits for Windows, Unix/Linux and Mac OS X systems are included);
- checking whether the intended target system is susceptible to the chosen exploit (optional);
- choosing and configuring a payload (code that will be executed on the target system upon successful entry, for instance a remote shell or a VNC server); and
- executing the exploit.
This modularity of allowing to combine any exploit with any payload is the major advantage of the Framework: it facilitates the tasks of attackers, exploit writers, and payload writers.
The current stable version of the Metasploit Framework (v2.5) is written in the Perl programming language; version 3.0, in alpha as of 2006, is implemented in Ruby. It runs on all versions of Unix (including Linux and Mac OS X), and also on Windows using the Cygwin framework. It includes two command line interfaces and a web-based interface. The web interface is intended to be run from the attacker's computer; a demo version can be tried out at http://www.metasploit.com:55555. The Metasploit Framework can be extended to use external add-ons in multiple languages.
To choose exploit and payload, some information about the target system is needed such as operating system version and installed network services. This information can be gleaned with port scanning and OS fingerprinting tools such as nmap. Nessus can in addition detect the target system's vulnerabilities. ŬŬŬ
Opcode Database
The Opcode Database is an important resource for writers of new exploits. Buffer overflow exploits on Windows often require precise knowledge of the position of certain machine language opcodes in the attacked program or included DLLs. These positions differ in the various versions and patch-levels of a given operating system, and they are all documented and conveniently searchable in the Opcode Database. This allows to write buffer overflow exploits which work across different versions of the target operating system.
Shellcode Database
The Shellcode database contains the payloads (also known as shellcodes) used by the Metasploit Framework. These are written in assembly language and full source code is available.
Trivia
- The Metasploit Project began as a portable network game.
- The Metasploit website was started in the summer of 2003.
External links
- The Metasploit Project official website
- Powerful payloads: The evolution of exploit frameworks, searchsecurity.com, 2005-10-20
- Step-by-step tutorial, attacking a system using the command-line interface
msfconsole - Step-by-step tutorial, attacking a remote system with the web interfacing
- Chapter 12: Writing Exploits III from Sockets, Shellcode, Porting & Coding: Reverse Engineering Exploits and Tool Coding for Security Professionals by James C. Foster (ISBN 1597490059). Written by Vincent Liu, chapter 12 explains how to use Metasploit to develop a buffer overflow exploit from scratch.
"Metasploit Project"