Laika

Laika is a simple botnet stack for red teaming. It allows authenticated communication across a custom protocol with generated key pairs which are embedded into the executable (only the public key is embedded in the bot client ofc).

Some notable features thus far:

• Lightweight, the bot alone is 270kb (22kb if not statically linked with LibSodium) and uses very little resources.
• Uses obfuscation techniques also seen in the wild (string obfuscation, tiny VMs executing sensitive operations, etc.)
• Simple configuration using CMake
  • Setting keypairs (-DLAIKA_PUBKEY=? -DLAIKA_PRIVKEY=?)
  • Obfuscation modes

Why?

It's a fun project :)

Would this work in real world scenarios?

My hope is that this becomes complete enough to be accurate to real botnet sources seen in the wild. However since Laika uses a binary protocol, the traffic the bot/CNC create would look very suspect and scream to sysadmins. This is why most botnets nowadays use an HTTP-based protocol, not only to 'blend in' with traffic, but it also scales well with large networks of bots where the CNC can be deployed across multiple servers and have a generic HTTP load balancer.

I could add some padding to each packet to make it look pseudo-HTTP-like, however I haven't given much thought to this.

Configuration and compilation

Make sure you have the following libraries and tools installed:

• CMake (>=3.10)
• LibSodium (static library)
• NCurses

First, compile the target normally

$ cmake -B build && cmake --build build

Now, generate your custom key pair using genKey

$ ./bin/genKey

Next, rerun cmake, but passing your public and private keypairs

$ rm -rf build &&\
    cmake -B build -DLAIKA_PUBKEY=997d026d1c65deb6c30468525132be4ea44116d6f194c142347b67ee73d18814 -DLAIKA_PRIVKEY=1dbd33962f1e170d1e745c6d3e19175049b5616822fac2fa3535d7477957a841 -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=MinSizeRel &&\
    cmake --build build

Output binaries are put in the ./bin folder