TL;DR
This paper presents an in-memory embedding of CPython that enables loading and executing Python scripts entirely in memory, aiding security researchers and Red Teams in developing undetectable offensive tools.
Contribution
It introduces a novel in-memory CPython embedding that allows execution of Python scripts without disk access, enhancing offensive capabilities and detection evasion.
Findings
Used in production for over a year
Enables rapid malware prototyping
Difficult for security products to detect
Abstract
We offer an embedding of CPython that runs entirely in memory without "touching" the disk. This in-memory embedding can load Python scripts directly from memory instead these scripts having to be loaded from files on disk. Malware that resides only in memory is harder to detect or mitigate against. We intend for our work to be used by security researchers to rapidly develop and deploy offensive techniques that is difficult for security products to analyze given these instructions are in bytecode and only translated to machine-code by the interpreter immediately prior to execution. Our work helps security researchers and enterprise Red Teams who play offense. Red Teams want to rapidly prototype malware for their periodic campaigns and do not want their malware to be detected by the Incident Response (IR) teams prior to accomplishing objectives. Red Teams also have difficulty running…
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