TTYs and where to find them

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tty • spawn • shell
Table of contents :

Introduction

When you’re attacking a remote machine, you often use reverse shells to get access to the machine. However, when your reverse shell connects back to you, you might have noticed a few programs that you cannot run, such as sudo, su, passwd, sometimes nano and vim … All these programs are supposed to be run inside a TTY, but your reverse shell is not (yet) a TTY !

Not a tty

In the example above I used a simple mkfifo reverse shell in the left terminal to connect to the listener in the right terminal. When the reverse shell is connected, I used the tty command to check whether we are in a TTY or not.

A bit of history

In UNIX systems, tty stands for TeleTYpewriter.

Spawning TTYs

Expect

You can check if expect is installed with :

$ expect -v
  expect version 5.45.4

If it is, you can open a TTY with an expect script like this :

#!/usr/bin/expect
spawn /bin/sh
interact

Or in a few lines of shell :

printf '#!/usr/bin/expect\nspawn /bin/sh\ninteract\n' > /tmp/gimmetty.sh
chmod +x /tmp/gimmetty.sh
/tmp/gimmetty.sh

Script

The script command makes a typescript of a terminal session.

/usr/bin/script -qc /bin/sh

Python

These two payloads works the same on Python 2 an Python 3 :

python -c 'import pty; pty.spawn("/bin/sh")'

python -c '__import__("pty").spawn("/bin/sh")'

Managing your TTY

Now that you have upgraded your shell to a TTY, you might need to change some of the configurations of it.

reset

This command is very useful when you have broken your shell (for example after a cat on a binary file …). You can reset the TTY

$ reset -h
reset: invalid option -- 'h'
Usage: tset [options] [terminal]

Options:
  -c          set control characters
  -e ch       erase character
  -I          no initialization strings
  -i ch       interrupt character
  -k ch       kill character
  -m mapping  map identifier to type
  -Q          do not output control key settings
  -q          display term only, do no changes
  -r          display term on stderr
  -s          output TERM set command
  -V          print curses-version
  -w          set window-size

If neither -c/-w are given, both are assumed.

stty

Print or change terminal characteristics.

$ stty --help
Usage: stty [-F DEVICE | --file=DEVICE] [SETTING]...
  or:  stty [-F DEVICE | --file=DEVICE] [-a|--all]
  or:  stty [-F DEVICE | --file=DEVICE] [-g|--save]
Print or change terminal characteristics.

References