Today, 1 year ago, Veil was publicly released, and it’s humbling to look at how far we’ve come since then.

When we initially released Veil, it was a single flat 538-line file that only contained 7 different payloads. Thanks to the hard work of @harmj0y and @themightyshiv, Veil was expanded into a fully functional framework with significantly expanded capabilities, and the AV-evasion component was renamed Veil-Evasion. With the release of Veil-Catapult and Veil-PowerView, we’ve started looking beyond just the problem of antivirus towards other offensive areas. Our continuing goal with the Veil-Framework is to maintain an open-source toolkit that spans particular gap areas we’ve encountered.

Veil-Evasion originally supported only three different payload shellcode-injection options, Meterpreter’s reverse_tcp, reverse_http, and reverse_https payloads. As of Veil-Evasion 2.0, all Windows payloads from the Metasploit tree are now loaded and available for use within any */shellcode_inject/* payload. Our payload releases then moved beyond just shellcode injectors with the release of native Meterpreter tcp and http[s] stagers, and we soon started a continual payload release cycle name VDay. We’ve debated disclosure, introduced some auxiliary modules, released a Python obfuscator named Pyherion, and recently integrated a generator for obfuscated Pyinstaller loaders named Pwnstaller. We showed you how to easily check if your payloads have been submitted to Virustotal, integrated Veil-Evasion with Cortana, and got a proper logo. Along the way we’ve had the honor of presenting at Shmooon, CarolinaCon, and soon Defcon. Oh, and we just got our own McAfee signature :)

The framework structure now allows anyone to expand or modify the existing codebase. New payload generation modules (public or private) can be dropped into an appropriate language folder and will be automatically loaded up by the framework. We have a lot of existing functionality you can draw on for development of private payload modules, a template located in the tree at ./modules/payloads/template.py, and a tutorial on payload development posted here.

So, we’re a year in now, but where do we go from here? We have a couple of goals we hope to achieve:

• Port msfvenom to Python – We use MSF’s msfvenom for shellcode generation in the shellcode_inject modules when code isn’t supplied by the user. Being dependent on a third party tool can cause occasional issues, e.g. when the output of msfvenom was modified and a variety of our payloads would crash on execution. Porting msfvenom to Python will allow us to have complete control of the output, and any changes to the tool would be controlled by the Veil Development team, allowing us to account for the changes within the framework.

• Research – We have a reasonable chunk of private research that’s been feeding our VDay releases. We currently have enough to continue VDay into next year, with some cool stuff hitting in the next few months. We’re keeping on our research efforts and hope to be releasing for a while :)

• New tool development – We keep building tools to span whatever gap areas we see. The newest tool in development by @harmj0y is a post-exploitation framework named Veil-Pillage, and will be presented on at Defcon.

All that’s really left to say is thanks. We started off creating this project for our own use, but we soon realized we should try to give something back to the industry by making Veil publicly available. The community uptake and use of Veil has been nothing but humbling for all of us. Never did we expect so many people to hear of and use Veil, let alone have it be added to Kali Linux. There have been blog posts, how-to videos, and more developed by the community which showcase the framework and talk about how it’s been successfully used. For all the kind words and support, we thank you.

As always, if anyone ever has any questions on framework modifications, ideas for techniques or modules, or just wants to bounce offensive ideas off of someone, please feel free to get in touch with us. These tools are something we’re genuinely passionate about, and we love talking about new techniques, ways to get better, or simply helping others. We’re just a quick forum post, e-mail, tweet, or IRC message away (#veil on Freenode!).

Thanks for a great first year, and we hope to have many more. Don’t get caught!

#avlol