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by joe_v 899 days ago
That makes sense, something like `grep $USER /etc/passwd` would shuffle the whole passwd file over the wire, etc; for a lot of post-exploitation stuff I could see it causing more trouble than it's worth.
1 comments

Oh, it’s far far worse than that. Just the core operation would be:

open() — network round trip fstat() — network round trip brk() — network round trip read() — network round trip Shuffle data over network read() — network round trip Shuffle data over network

Etc etc

For a “grep root /etc/passwd” there are 88 syscalls on a Debian 11. If we assume a very generous 50ms latency for every syscall, that means we’re waiting 4.4s for the result.

The use case for syscall proxying is limited to when you don’t want to upload an exploit onto a target machine, but you need to run the exploit on that machine. So it could be an LPE or something.

It is way too slow for post exploitation work.