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

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.

Directories explained

• /cmake-modules holds helper functions for finding things like libSodium.
• /lib is a shared static library between the client, peer & panel clients.
• /cnc is the Command aNd Control server.
• /bot is the bot client to be ran on the target machine.
• /shell is the main shell to connect to the CNC server with to issue commands.
• /panel is a very incomplete & broken ncurses client. ignore for now.
• /tools holds tools for generating keypairs, etc.

Configuration and compilation

Make sure you have the following libraries and tools installed:

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

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