I just realized I have never published a post about lolbinish/persistencish Matlab feature that I referred to in this twit. The Tl;dr; is that Matlab can load a DLL of our choice when we use its feature that is both Matlab-user friendly, and … unbelievable.

Using the following command line invocation:

MATLAB.exe -nosplash -nodesktop -r "run('c:\test\test.m'); exit;"

we can instruct matlab to load the matlab file named ‘test.m’ in a batch-like fashion.

The ‘test.m’ in this example include a short piece of code shown below:

x = foo();

When matlab loads the ‘test.m’, it tries to resolve the function ‘foo’ that it will eventually recognize as unknown; as a result, it will look for locally present Matlab executable files (*.mex32 on 32-, and *.mexw64 on 64-bit Windows), and will try to find that function there. In our case (on 64-bit version of OS/matlab) it will look for a ‘foo.mexw64’ file, load it (it is a DLL), and then call a function mexFunction acting as an interface between matlab and the matlab executable.

The example session is shown in this animation:

It’s obvious there are at least two scenarios where this ‘feature’ can be used for offensive purposes:

• niche Lolbin – having a library of your choice loaded by matlab may help to evade security software
• niche and stealthy persistence – matlab files can be modified in a viral way to force the loading our our library of choice at some random moment in the future