September, October, November, December, and most of January passed by silently without any RustRAT updates. There are many reasons for this, the two main ones being that I sort of lost the spark after completing a sort-of usable tech demo, and that work mostly fulfilled my programming needs with a few interesting assignments. Now I am back in action, however, and first up is making it more ergonomic to write code that is intended to run in the WASM “sandbox” (which is not much of a sandbox at all with all the holes I am punching in it).

It is now one year since I wrote the first blog post about RustRAT. Even though I did not start writing any actual code until this year, I still consider this some kind of anniversary. On this anniversary, few of the goals I set for version 0.1 remain. However, as I have worked on RustRAT, I have come to realise that quite a lot remains until RustRAT is something I would consider using in an engagement.

It has been three weeks since my last post, and progress has been slow. I will be trying to write small status updates semi-regularly both to keep myself motivated and try to document the development of RustRAT. Since last time, I have written code for running WebAssembly programs and for calling arbitrary functions from DLLs at run-time using libffi, more specifically with the libffi-rs bindings. Currently, I am working on trying to put these two parts together using a lot of ugly and unsafe Rust. The code gluing these two parts together will not be easy to read, even harder to alter, and quite possibly impossible to debug, but I am hoping to have something that works (for certain values of work) in a few weeks.

It has been more than six months since I wrote the first blog post about RustRAT. During these months, the closest I have come to actually doing something has been to build myself a new computer with many cores in order to compile code faster or something like that. However, rather than develop RustRAT I have been busy playing all the games I have been unable to play the last ten years due to lack of a computer able to play recent games. It is about time for me to actually attempt to create RustRAT. The plans are mostly unchanged since the last blog post, but I have made one significant change.

I am writing this blog as I started developing a RAT during the spring of 2020 and wanted a place to document my ideas and progress with this project. This is something I have been planning on doing for a couple of years, but I did not get around to actually writing any code until this spring. RustRAT is as its name suggests, a Remote Access Trojan written in rust, and even though it is not included in the name, lua.