Security Research Posts — Vulnerability Disclosures, Assembly & Network Protocols

Governing an AI agent with another AI firewall creates the Quis Custodiet paradox: both systems are probabilistic and subject to prompt injection and data poisoning. The kernel has no concept of intent — it enforces access control via EPERM regardless of what the agent claims. Container isolation (namespace + cgroup), strict RBAC, stripped Linux capabilities, and SELinux/AppArmor MAC profiles provide deterministic guarantees that semantic AI parsing cannot. Agents with no .env file read permission cannot exfiltrate .env files, regardless of how they’re prompted.

Fixed-interval C2 beacons produce detectable periodic patterns in SOC traffic baselines and behavioral analysis engines. LCG jitter breaks this: rdtsc reads the CPU Time Stamp Counter for hardware entropy, imul+add applies the Numerical Recipes LCG scramble (X = 1664525X + 1013904223 mod 2^32), div maps the result to [100ms, 1000ms), sys_nanosleep (syscall 35) executes the delay. Result: uniform random inter-beacon intervals with 2^32 period, zero external dependencies, full register preservation, pure x64 Assembly.

Static analysis tools and AI-driven EDRs map malicious behavior through branching instructions — JMP, JZ, JNZ form the edges of a Control Flow Graph that heuristic engines traverse. CMOV-based CFG flattening removes all conditional branches, collapsing the graph to a single flat node sequence that defeats both signature-based and ML-based detection. Full x64 Assembly implementation: branch-free syscall obfuscation, CMOV patterns for JZ/JNZ/JLE replacement, and empirical bypass results against NGAV and Ghidra CFG analysis.

Standard ptrace injection generates detectable syscall sequences that EDR hooks intercept. Phantom Evasion Loader routes ptrace through SROP frames: crafting a fake sigcontext on the stack and firing sys_rt_sigreturn (syscall 15) causes the kernel to restore arbitrary register state — ptrace fires through the signal return path, invisible to direct syscall monitors. process_vm_writev (syscall 311) writes the full payload in one cross-process memory operation instead of 204 PTRACE_POKEDATA events. QWORD XOR decryption runs in-memory before injection. Results: 0/65 VirusTotal static, SROP + process_vm_writev invisible to Hatching Triage behavioral sandbox.

Uncompressed C2 payloads have two problems: size triggers bandwidth anomalies, and high-entropy raw shellcode scores above 7.5 on entropy analysis tools. VESQER addresses both: DPCM computes per-byte deltas (reducing entropy by exploiting local correlation), RLE collapses repeated delta values (reducing size on structured shellcode). Pure x64 Assembly, zero libc, zero dependencies. Complete implementation walkthrough: delta computation, run-length encoding loop, decode stub design, and measured compression ratios on real C2 payloads.

Standard Assembly code with absolute addresses breaks under ASLR — fixed addresses become invalid at runtime. PIC solves this via RIP-relative addressing: all memory references computed as offsets from the current instruction pointer. The Stack Anchor technique carves a 32KB R/W region (sub rsp,0x8000 + and rsp,-16 + mov rbp,rsp), providing writable storage without .data or .bss sections. Read-only templates in .text are copied to the stack via rep movsb for runtime modification. Result: a single position-independent code block deployable anywhere in memory — standard for shellcode, injection payloads, and fileless implants.