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Paranoid Penguin - Limitations of shc, a Shell Encryption Utility

Issue 138

From Issue #138
October 2005

Aug 26, 2005  By Nalneesh Gaur
 in
The shell script compiler, shc, obfuscates shell scripts with encryption—but the password is in the encrypted file. Could an intruder recover the original script using objdump?
Conclusion

An approach to extract the shell source code successfully from shc version 3.7 generated binary executable was demonstrated. The pub.sh script was used for illustrative purposes only. I have indeed tested the deshc program on executables that I did not create and without access to the source code or the original shell script.

Francisco García, the author of shc, recently released version 3.8. It uses somewhat different data structures and improves upon the security of the previous version. Nevertheless, I believe that embedding the encryption password within the binary executable is dangerous and prone to extraction as discussed in this article.

Nalneesh Gaur, CISSP, ISAAP, works at Diamond Cluster International as a BS7799 Lead Auditor.

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How to work with octave scripts ?

spiriad's picture
Submitted by spiriad (not verified) on Tue, 03/10/2009 - 16:48.

How to make it work with octave scripts, knowing the first line in my_octave_script.sh is #! /usr/bin/octave -q
??

Where we can download DESHC

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Sat, 03/22/2008 - 12:22.

Where we can download DESHC ?

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