[Tipz] Remote terminal snooping

Ian Langworth bass at ccs.neu.edu
Thu Sep 30 23:10:28 EDT 2004


(I found this gem in the FreeBSD mailing list archives.)

If you want somebody to be able to watch your shell session from
afar -- i.e., watching you as you type, here's a simple way to
do it. Start by creating a named pipe:

    mkfifo /tmp/foo
    chmod 0600 /tmp/foo

Then, in the terminal you want your friend to watch, run
typescript with an argument to tell it what file to write to:

    script -f /tmp/foo

In another terminal on the same machine, start up netcat to
listen on a port and provide the named pipe as stdin:

    nc -l -p 1234 </tmp/foo

The terminal running script will say "Script started, file is
/tmp/foo". Tell your friend to also run netcat and connect to
the port:

    nc example.com 1234

Wha-bam! It helps to have both your script terminal and theirs
be the same geometry.

I make no claims as to the security of this method. Go forth and tunnel :)

-- 
Ian Langworth
Project Guerrilla
Northeastern University
College of Computer and Information Science




More information about the Tipz mailing list