Introducing the Metasploit Development Diaries

Last updated at Fri, 09 Feb 2024 14:25:42 GMT

"Dear Diary: The PR queue was full of RCE again today..."

The Metasploit team is made up of roughly a dozen software engineers and security researchers who work with a dedicated, passionate community to improve the core of Framework and add a whole lot of modules that continually redefine how users and developers understand risk. Metasploit’s researchers analyze mountains of input and oddities on a daily basis: CVEs, potentially vulnerable applications, proofs-of-concept (PoCs), public exploits, vendor-issued patches, blogs, pastes, Twitter threads, stack traces, error messages—and, of course, pull requests (which frequently involve a combination of these other input types). In the course of all this analysis, the open-source team has amassed an impressive corpus of research notes detailing everything from unexpected behavior to development practices we appreciate and encourage.

When a new module lands in Metasploit Framework, it’s not simply because someone clicked the merge button. Rather, it’s the result of a collaborative process to track down vulnerable code, turn it into something useful, and communicate the deeper value and impact of that utility to the wider world.

We think it’s time this trove of analysis leaves the cave of Metasploit .md files and sees the light of day.

So, here it is: the inaugural edition of the Metasploit Development Diaries. From PoC to PR to msfconsole prompt, these are stories of how exploitable conditions become stable, seasoned Framework modules. We’ll publish a few of our favorites each quarter, highlighting quirks that caught our attention and sharing Metasploit’s notes on why certain classes of vulnerability are particularly interesting to us as an offensive security team.

In addition to technical analysis from lead Metasploit security researcher Wei Chen, we feature module submissions from three Metasploit contributors in this quarter’s development diaries: Mehmet Ince, Green-m, and Alex Gonzalez. We’re grateful to them for their continuing contributions to the project, and to everyone who makes a point of sharing their knowledge.

Read Metasploit’s first set of development diaries here.

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