I modified the source code of ReactOS‘ cmd and regedit for the following trick:

Let me summarize how I did this, as this is the combined result of several techniques I blogged about before.

• The Excel spreadsheet contains macros that use VirtualAlloc, WriteProcessMemory and CreateThread to “inject” shellcode (stored inside macros) into the Excel process itself. Details here and source code here.
• The shellcode loads a DLL from memory into memory.
• I modified source code from ReactOS to transform cmd.exe into cmd.dll and regedit into a dll.

You can download regedit.dll here and the new version of cmd.dll with the DLL command here. The DLL command I added allows you to load a DLL with LoadLibrary or directly into memory (/m option). When loaded with LoadLibrary, the library will be unloaded with FreeLibrary unless you use option /k to keep it loaded.

The DLL command assumes that your DLLs execute via the DllMain entry-point when they get loaded.

This is something I’ve wanted to do for some time: take a command interpreter and transform it from an EXE into a DLL.

Why you ask? Well, because it’s a fun challenge 😉

But also because a DLL is loaded into a process. In a restricted environment, it can be injected into a legitimate process and thus bypass the restriction mechanisms.

Metasploit’s Meterpreter is another example of a command interpreter in DLL form.

cmd.exe from Microsoft is closed source, but there is an open-source variant available from the ReactOS project.

Compiling cmd.exe from ReactOS is simple: download the source-code and the ReactOS build environment. Install it, start the build environment  and issue command make cmd. That’s all you need to do to compile cmd.exe (I used version 0.3.11).

Transforming the source code to generate a DLL in stead of an EXE is simple. You need to change 3 files.

Edit file cmd.rbuild and make these changes to the module element:

<module name="cmd" type="win32dll" installbase="system32" installname="cmd.dll" unicode="yes" crt="msvcrt">

Because I want to use this DLL in GUI-processes without console, I need to create a console. Edit file cmd.c and add AllocConsole(); to function cmd_main:

SetFileApisToOEM();
InputCodePage= 0;
OutputCodePage = 0;

AllocConsole();

hConsole = CreateFile(_T("CONOUT$"), GENERIC_READ|GENERIC_WRITE,
 FILE_SHARE_READ|FILE_SHARE_WRITE, NULL,
 OPEN_EXISTING, 0, NULL);

And because a DLL has another entry-function than an EXE, edit file main.c and replace function main with function DllMain:

#include <precomp.h>

INT WINAPI
DllMain(
 IN PVOID hInstanceDll,
 IN ULONG dwReason,
 IN PVOID reserved)
{
 switch (dwReason)
 {
 case DLL_PROCESS_ATTACH:
 cmd_main(0, NULL);
 break;

 case DLL_THREAD_ATTACH:
 break;

 case DLL_THREAD_DETACH:
 break;

 case DLL_PROCESS_DETACH:
 break;
 }

 return TRUE;
}

That’s it. Recompile with make cmd to generate cmd.dll

There are still some improvements we can make, but that’s for a later version: error messages are not displayed, exiting the shell terminates the host process, …

You can download the modified source files and compiled cmd.dll here.

This is a screenshot of cmd.dll injected inside Excel with my memory module shellcode: