nDepth Employee Contributions to Open Source Security Software, January 2024 Edition

METASPLOIT PROJECT

The Metasploit Project, owned by Rapid 7, is a computer security program which is the world’s most used penetration testing framework. This Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) is used by nearly all penetration testers, and is extremely common in training courses from SANS, EC-Council, and many others.

The Metasploit Project, being Open Source Software, flourishes from the contributions of the community. nDepth’s own Mike Cyr (h00die) is a frequent contributor to the project and has continued to spend their personal time conducting security research and providing enhancements to Metasploit for the benefit of the security community. This month, h00die contributed the following enhancements:

SPELLING FIXES ACROSS PROJECT

Spelling can be difficult, especially when writing code, as there is a mix of code and natural language. Writing a document in an editor such as Microsoft Word lets you easily spellcheck everything, however, code editors such as VS Code don’t have the same capability. The Codespell project was developed specifically to help with this problem. h00die used codespell against the Metasploit Project source code to correct many of the spelling errors, making the code and output of the project easier to read and understand. This month, auxiliary modules, payloads, nops, evasions, encoders, specs (tests), tools, plugins, scripts, and libs (libraries) were the main focuses. More than 300 files were updated.

FIX ASAN SUID PRIV ESC CHECK METHOD

The san_suid_executable_priv_esc module within Metasploit could be a little difficult to use in certain scenarios. When used with the default configuration, or via the local_exploit_suggester module, it would always fail with the description “file not found”. h00die suggested a fix so that the error would be easier for a user to determine what went wrong.

To view this month’s contributions, check the following links: