Inject a shared library (i.e. arbitrary code) into a live linux process, without ptrace. Inspired by Cexigua and linux-inject, among other things.

Note: currently requires the python3 branch of pwntools. It's a fairly heavyweight dependency that I only use a few features of, so I might be able to remove it in the future.

usage: dlinject.py [-h] [--nostop] pid lib.so

Inject a shared library into a live process.

positional arguments:
  pid         target pid
  lib.so      Path of the shared library to load (note: must be relative to the target process's cwd, or absolute)

optional arguments:
  -h, --help  show this help message and exit
  --nostop    Don't stop the target process prior to injection (race condition-y, but avoids potential side-effects
              of SIGSTOP)

• Because I can.

• There are various anti-ptrace techniques, which this evades by simply not using ptrace.

• Using LD_PRELOAD can sometimes be fiddly or impossible, if the process you want to inject into is spawned by another process with a clean environment.

• Send the stop signal to the target process. (optional)

• Locate the _dl_open() symbol.

• Retreive RIP and RSP via /proc/[pid]/syscall.

• Make a backup of part of the stack, and the code we're about to overwrite with our shellcode, by reading from /proc/[pid]/mem.

• Generate primary and secondary shellcode buffers.

• Insert primary shellcode at RIP, by writing to /proc/[pid]/mem.

• The primary shellcode:

  • Pushes common registers to the stack.
  • Loads the secondary shellcode via mmap().
  • Jumps to the secondary shellcode.

• The secondary shellcode:

  • Restores the stack and program code to their original states.
  • Pivots the stack (so we don't touch the original one at all).
  • Calls _dl_open() to load the user-specified library. Any constructors will be executed on load, as usual.
  • Restores register state, un-pivots the stack, and jumps back to where it was at the time of the original SIGSTOP.

• Sending SIGSTOP may cause unwanted side-effects, for example if another thread is waiting on waitpid(). The --nostop option avoids this, but introduces race conditions.

• I'm not entirely sure how this will interact with complex multi-threaded applications. There's certainly potential for breakage.

• x86-64 Linux only (for now - 32-bit support could potentially be added).

• Requires root, or relaxed YAMA configuration (echo 0 | sudo tee /proc/sys/kernel/yama/ptrace_scope is useful when testing).

• If the target process is sandboxed (e.g. seccomp filters), it might not have permission to mmap() the second stage shellcode, or to dlopen() the library.