Late one night before a CS110 assignment was due, Wes and I got bored of working on the assignment, so we decided to flex our pipe, fork, and dup2 muscles and created a (questionably) fun little C program which takes credentials and a target (SUNet ID) as arguments, and proceeds to search the stanford myth machines for a logged in user match. If the target is found, it bombards their terminal with a given payload txt, our example being twilight.txt
who()- linux command showing who is currently logged in - https://linux.die.net/man/1/whowrite()- linux command which lets you write to a file descriptor (including another logged in user on the machine) - https://linux.die.net/man/2/write- paramiko - python library automating the remote ssh process - http://www.paramiko.org
The Stanford Myth machines are comprised of a series of computers in the Gates basement. You are not guaranteed to be assigned to the same machine everytime you ssh into the cluster (load balancing..), so to find a user we have to ssh into every machine (paramiko) and check if they've been logged in, using who(), to that marticular machine. Through trial and error, we found that machines are labelled from 1-33 (with some specific ones missing or down). Once target has been acquired, we print the payload to their terminal using the magic of write().
- This was written for FUN NOT EVIL. The myth machines are where CS107 and CS110 students code their precious assignment. This tool is not for harassing students near assignment deadlines.
- This assumes the number of myth machines, it may have changed since this was written.