Staresc - automatic and extendable vulnerability assessment over SSH

Abstract

Regardless of the technical level and the type of target, time is one of the major constraints during both defensive and offensive activities. To address this constraint, the cybersecurity community implemented many tools to automate repetitive tasks. Cybersecurity experts exploit these tools in order to have more time to spend on more tricky (and fun) activities. In this work we present Staresc: a tool that automates command-line PoCs execution on multiple targets, relying on SSH or Telnet connections. Staresc is an easily extendable tool that performs tests on target machines, the tests are defined in YAML files (called plugins) that the tool can import at execution time. Together with Staresc, we describe how to properly write its plugins and we outline a practical way to test, and validate, them. Moreover, Staresc has been compared with the major competitors already available. We show which ideas introduced by other tools we adapt to our use case, which new features we introduced and which motivations led our technical choices. Lastly, we discuss about possible improvements, covering the possible implementation challenges and their benefits.