Lua based DnsCat traffic parser

For the ones who don’t know DnsCat it’s an awsome tool and even has metasploit shellcodes. Here’s a little quote from the website:

dnscat is designed in the spirit of netcat, allowing two hosts over the Internet to talk to each other. The major difference between dnscat and netcat, however, is that dnscat routes all traffic through the local (or a chosen) DNS server. This has several major advantages:

  • Bypasses pretty much all network firewalls
  • Bypasses many local firewalls
  • Doesn’t pass through the typical gateway/proxy and therefore is stealthy

Which brings us to my original quest of finding a nice protocol to experiment with Wireshark dissector prototyping using LUA. I decided to try and make a dissector for DnsCat traffic. This post won’t contain the dissector, instead it contains a stand alone LUA DnsCat traffic parser(main dissector logic). Reason for this is that I’m not entirely happy with the dissector as it is right now,  I want to try and improve some things on it before publishing it. To be able to run this parser you’ll need to install an additional LUA library though, since LUA doesn’t have native support for bitwise operators. You can get the library from the following website:

http://bitop.luajit.org/

The installation is pretty straightforward, if you are on ubuntu you could also just do the following:

sudo apt-get install liblua5.1-bitop0

Ones you have that in place you should be able to run the parser without any problems. You can get the parser from pastebin or at the end of this post. If you are really impatient you can throw together a quick dissector yourself and just reuse this code for the dissecting part. I’ve also included some references at the end of this post that I’ve used while developing the parser.

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