icmpsh – Simple ICMP Reverse Shell

Last updated: January 21, 2017 | 3,353 views

icmpsh is a simple ICMP reverse shell with a win32 slave and a POSIX-compatible master in C, Perl or Python. The main advantage over the other similar open source tools is that it does not require administrative privileges to run onto the target machine.

icmpsh - Simple ICMP Reverse Shell

The tool is clean, easy and portable. The slave (client) runs on the target Windows machine, it is written in C and works on Windows only whereas the master (server) can run on any platform on the attacker machine as it has been implemented in C and Perl by and this port is in Python.

Features

Open source software.
Client/server architecture.
The master is portable across any platform that can run either C, Perl or Python code.
The target system has to be Windows because the slave runs on that platform only for now.
The user running the slave on the target system does not require administrative privileges.

Running the master

The master is straight forward to use. There are no extra libraries required for the C and Python versions. The Perl master however, has the following dependencies:

IO::Socket
NetPacket::IP
NetPacket::ICMP

When running the master, don’t forget to disable ICMP replies by the OS. For example:

sysctl -w net.ipv4.icmp_echo_ignore_all=1

1	sysctl -w net.ipv4.icmp_echo_ignore_all=1

If you miss doing that, you will receive information from the slave, but the slave is unlikely to receive commands send from the master.

Running the slave

The slave comes with a few command line options as outlined below:

-t host            host ip address to send ping requests to. This option is mandatory!

-r                 send a single test icmp request containing the string "Test1234" and then quit. 
                   This is for testing the connection.

-d milliseconds    delay between requests in milliseconds 

-o milliseconds    timeout of responses in milliseconds. If a response has not received in time, 
                   the slave will increase a counter of blanks. If that counter reaches a limit, the slave will quit.
                   The counter is set back to 0 if a response was received.

-b num             limit of blanks (unanswered icmp requests before quitting

-s bytes           maximal data buffer size in bytes