Stegosploit – Drive-by Browser Exploits using only Images

By Saumil Shah on 11 Sep 2015 @ 44con
📊 Presentation 💻 Source Code 📹 Video 🔗 Link
#steganography #red-teaming #web-security #exploit-delivery
Focus Areas: 🔐 Application Security , 🎯 Penetration Testing , 🌐 Web Application Security
This talk covers technique(s) listed below
STEGOSPLOIT

Presentation Material

Abstract

“A good exploit is one that is delivered with style”.

Stegosploit creates a new way to encode “drive-by” browser exploits and deliver them through image files. These payloads are undetectable using current means. This paper discusses two broad underlying techniques used for image based exploit delivery – Steganography and Polyglots. Drive-by browser exploits are steganographically encoded into JPG and PNG images. The resultant image file is fused with HTML and Javascript decoder code, turning it into an HTML+Image polyglot. The polyglot looks and feels like an image, but is decoded and triggered in a victim’s browser when loaded.

AI Generated Summary

Here is a summary of the content:

The speaker discusses two techniques for delivering exploits without controlling the web server:

  1. Content sniffing: Uploading an exploit to an image bucket or web server, allowing anyone who clicks on the link to be served the exploit.
  2. Clever caching: Using expires tags to store malicious objects in a user’s browser cache, then triggering the exploit at a later time, making it difficult for incident response teams to trace.

The speaker also mentions:

  • Steganography and polyglot image formats as methods for hiding exploits
  • The importance of building security into browsers at a core level, rather than relying on detection methods like file headers, MIME types, and signatures
  • A simple fix for steganographic content: resizing images to strip out hidden data

The talk concludes with thanks to various individuals and a mention of the publication “POPF GTFO” which contains more information on the techniques discussed.

Disclaimer: This summary was auto-generated from the video transcript using AI and may contain inaccuracies. It is intended as a quick overview — always refer to the original talk for authoritative content. Learn more about our AI experiments.