I spent most of my summer vacation doing other things than programming malware, but now I am back in full force. First on the agenda is “releasing” version 0.1, and the release date is fast(-ish) approaching as the list of things I want done before version 0.1 keeps shrinking. Today I pushed the first code for the largest remaining part, the server’s user interface, which I have decided to name badtui.

Badtui is a small TUI I have cobbled together using Crossterm for displaying output, rats and entering commands. Version 1.0 of RustRAT will feature a web-based interface, but making that will probably be quite time-consuming, so I am creating badtui to have some sort of user interface that can be used before the web interface is ready. The TUI gets its name from that it is bad, probably quite buggy, and that it will crash if you do something strange like typing non-ascii characters. Input handling is done in custom code, which means that there is no support for fancy things like moving the cursor or pasting text (unless your terminal emulator does this for you by emulating key presses).

The TUI is not quite finished yet, but the current version of the RustRAT server on Github is able to start and display log messages and accept the command “quit” (C-c is also accepted to shut down the server, which is probably the most advanced input feature badtui will receive). That is it for now, I will be back with another update once badtui is more complete.