ARM targets

[sempervictus]

Summary

Apple and Microsoft are now actively supporting OS releases on ARM hardware variants. We have some rudimentary armle payloads for OSX, but not a Mettle stager. Sure Python works there, so we have some capacity to pwn them, but Windows is a different beast and sometimes you "need the binary payload" (though @smcintyre-r7 has done a tremendous job of empowering pyterp).
On order to properly target these systems, we need to have architecture & OS compatible stagers (shellcode), possibly added support in Metasm if these targets require different execution semantics/registers/etc, and compilation targets for binary payloads to build Meterpreter for ARM windows and Mettle for ARM OSX (and windows, preferably once mingw-arm64 is a thing in the toolchain).

Motivation

We need to pwn all the things, but our pwnfrastructure is lacking the capability for proper interaction with these targets.
For the commercial side - same thing: Pro needs to be able to hit these targets, all the usual business-level interests of happy customers/good coverage/etc.

Relevant Graybeards

ping @acammack-r7 @smcintyre-r7 @OJ - sorry if i missed anyone, not in the game as much as i should be, by no means an intentional sleight.

[sudonoodle]

Wow.. 3 years later. I think this is really important. ARM is absolutely everywhere in 2024 target environments, I think it would be extremely valuable to have at least one ARM-based Windows meterpreter payload...

I'm assuming this is a difficult one to add because it would require a lot of manual ASM conversion from x86 to ARM?

[adfoster-r7]

The latest on this: We have OSX aarch64 Meterpreter, as well as linux aarch64 Meterpreter nowadays

The current windows x86/x64 Meterpreters will generally work on ARM windows via its emulation support, but there's edgecases with certain post modules/stagers still; but we have plans for starting native aarch64 Windows Meterpreter later this year

[sempervictus]

Wow.. 3 years later. I think this is really important. ARM is absolutely everywhere in 2024 target environments, I think it would be extremely valuable to have at least one ARM-based Windows meterpreter payload...

I'm assuming this is a difficult one to add because it would require a lot of manual ASM conversion from x86 to ARM?

Static payloads are possible, but really we need to have Metasm expanded for ARM64 to properly leverage the composition pipeline and obfuscate/evade detection.