x-shell - Linux Reverse Shell

x-shell is a simple Linux reverse shell program written in C. It allows a user to establish a reverse shell connection from a target machine back to a listening attacker machine, providing remote access to execute commands, interact with the target system, as well as download and upload files.

Features

• Establish reverse shell connections from target machines to attacker machines.
• Interactive command execution and output retrieval.
• Download files from the attacker machine to the target machine. Upload files from the target machine to the attacker machine.
• Simple and lightweight implementation.

How To Compile

I used no external library other than standard C Library (libc) so all You need to have is a C Compiler(e.g. gcc) and make utility then just run make in top level directory this will create both Server(attacker) and Client(target) binaries:

./server/xShellServer -> attacker binary

./client/xShellClient -> target binary

How To Change Server Listening Port and IP?

there is a config.h header in the root of the repository, you can change these and some other parameters then you need to run make again

Why?

I wanted to learn linux programming, specifically:

• filesystem handling
• process management
• networking in pure C
• pty

so it's a learning project and not a real one, therefore it lacks some important features:

• no encryption at all, just good old plain-text tcp
• no well-created interactive shell for attacker(probably gnu-readline is all what it needs)
• no server daemon(server needs a deamon to handle connections and a front-end is needed to communicate with deamon)
• no configuration parsing(You probably don't want to recompile the whole Project just to change a server listening port:) )