GSoC 2018 Project Ideas

GSoC Project Ideas in no particular order. When you've picked one, take a look at GSoC-2018-Student-Proposal for how to make a proposal.

Submit your own

If you want to suggest your own idea, please discuss it with us first on our mailing list to make sure it is a reasonable amount of work for a summer and that it fits the goals of the project.

Mentors: @buster, @zerosteiner, @timwr, @asoto-r7, @jmartin-r7, @pbarry-r7

Improving the Post-exploit / Meterpreter functionality

Examples could include:

• Sending keystrokes and mouse movement to a Meterpreter session
• HTML based VNC style session control e.g #9196 but accepting user input from the browser
• Playing (streaming?) sounds to a Meterpreter session
• Implementing the streaming record mechanism from more Meterpreter sessions
• Text-to-speech and volume control
• Fun behaviors
  • Ejecting the CD-ROM drive
  • Flipping the screen upside down
  • Changing screen colors
  • Turning the monitor on/off
  • Ordering donuts
• MessageBox or live chat functionality (e.g "This machine is vulnerable to MS17-010, you must run Windows Update!")
• Overlaying an image or even HTML on the user interface

Difficulty: Varies

Improving post-exploit API to be more consistent, work smoothly across session types

The Metasploit post-exploitation API is intended to provide a unified interface between different Meterpreter, shell, powershell, mainframe, and other session types. However, there are areas where the implementation is not consistent, and could use improvements:

• Shell sessions do not implement the filesystem API that Meterpreter sessions have
• When a shell session is in a different language, e.g. Windows in French, the post API does not find the expected output. Add localization support for these.
• Simple commands like 'cmd_exec' are fast in Shell sessions but are relatively slow in Meterpreter sessions. Add an API to make Meterpreter run simple commands more easily.

Difficulty: Varies

Add meta-shell commands

Shell sessions typically expose a direct connection to a remote shell, but are lacking a number of nice features such as the ability to stop a remote command, background a job, or to even lock the session. This project would implement some pre-processing hooks to shell sessions so that job control could be added by default (allowing backgrounding of commands), meta-commands like 'background' and 'sessions' could be added as well.

Difficulty: 3/5

Improve the web vulnerability API

This would follow up on the Arachni plugin PR #8618 and improve the Metasploit data model to better represent modern web vulnerabilities. This project would require knowledge of data models, types of modern web vulnerabilities, and experience with web app security scanners.

Difficulty: 4/5

Session-style module interaction

Metasploit has the concept of 'sessions' where a connection context can define its own set of console operations. E.g. if you interact with a session, Metasploit switches to a specific subconsole for interaction. It would be nice as an alternative to 'action' for auxiliary modules, or as a way to merge related modules, to simply interact with the module.

Difficulty: 3/5

Integration plugin with a 3rd-party post-exploit framework

Connect a 3rd-party post-exploitation framework with Metasploit, such as Empire, Pupy, or Koadic, so that Metasploit can view and interact with sessions outside of its own types. Being able to use outside stagers in exploits, or adding the ability to 'upgrade' a session to an outside session type are other possibilities.

Difficulty 3/5