Ruse is secure, multi-platform, selective Reverse Proxy (or Redirector) that is fast and easy to deploy. It can help you concealing C2 communications, and reverse shells traffic using the HTTP protocol.

Ruse combines the core features of Python's SimpleHTTPServer, Apache's mod_rewrite, and SSL ProxyPass, all in a single, self-contained and highly-portable executable.

It supports both plain-text HTTP and HTTPS, in a fast and easy to configure portable server executable. Ruse can be rapidly deployed from the command-line or inside a Docker container for added security.

Features

• Runs under Linux, *BSD, Mac OS X, and Windows (7, Server 2008R2 and later)
• Supports Intel x86, AMD64, ARM, ARM64 and PPC64 (little-endian)
• No external dependencies (outside the Go standard library)
• HTTP and HTTPS (SSL/TLS) support
• Support IPv4 and IPv6 addressing
• Selective Reverse Proxying based on:
  • User-Agent header field, matching:
    • Exact String(s)
    • Regular Expression(s)
  • Client's network (CIDR matching)
• Support for VirtualHosts
• Serves static files (with optional directory listing)
• HTTP Logging

Use-cases

Ruse help you overcome multiple challenges, such as:

• Hiding your HTTP listeners from Incident Response teams.
• Load-balancing to multiple remote listeners.
• Simultaneously serving static files and listening for reverse HTTP shellcodes on a single port.
• Leveraging domain-fronting by exposing the redirector from a trusted location or domain.
• Pivoting traffic post-exploitation by proxying reverse HTTP shellcodes.
• Easily proxy your Metasploit's reverse_http(s) payloads.
• Selectively proxy your reverse shellcodes traffic with vhosts and regex matching.

If you're doing Red Team operations or you may simply want to hide your HTTP listeners during an engagement, Ruse may be for you!

Building from source

To build Ruse from source, simply enter make, it will build the ruse executable in the current working directory:

$ make
go build -o ruse -v src/ruse/main.go

Alternatively, you can build Ruse inside a Docker container using the make container command:

$ make container
building: bin/amd64/ruse
[...]

Running from the command-line

Ruse can run unprivileged from a terminal:

$ ./ruse -c conf/ruse.conf
Starting HTTP Server on localhost:8000

By default Ruse ships with a basic configuration file which only allows plain-text HTTP connections from localhost on port tcp/8000. It's also configured to proxy traffic from metasploit's reverse HTTP payloads by exact matching their default User-Agent header fields.

Building and running under Docker

Ruse can also run under a Docker container, and thus in a matter of seconds. Enter the make container command to build the Docker image and to push it to your local registry. Once the image has been created, simply start a new container like demonstrated in the below example:

$ make container
[...]
$ docker run -v `pwd`/conf/ruse.conf:/etc/ruse.conf -p 127.0.0.1:8000:8000/tcp registry/ruse-amd64:1.0.2
Starting HTTP Server on localhost:8000

Binaries

If you do not want to build Ruse from source, you can directly download the binaries below:

Releases

Filename	OS	Architecture	Version	SHA256 Checksum
ruse-1.0.2-linux-debian-amd64.deb	Linux Debian (derivatives)	x86-64	1.0.2	63b0f3fff7dd0bfa506b2623d1690d3fe9fc69ec15737a235f0c8712764a4c39
ruse-1.0.2-linux-aarch64.tar.xz	Linux (Generic)	AArch64	1.0.2	0ae13d43fc1279afb330116d4f16e894907f445413617823464df06d52ef45ad
ruse-1.0.2-win-amd64.zip	Windows (amd64)	x86-64	1.0.2	0615349405a47c59984827cf4d8e60480df274d25f430db70e8c2c1c0fb7dbb5
ruse-1.0.2-win-i386.zip	Windows (i386)	x86-32	1.0.2	e34566725a0a31b37e9d66a84123f2b667185fb3862d1db4208a35feed6f0ba9
ruse-1.0.2-darwin-amd64.zip	Mac OS X	x86-64	1.0.2	52e9804a413db8dca6470bcd13f55dd683e1559aa32c89107b892d98457c4ab3

Configuring

To configure the redirector, edit and copy the ruse.conf configuration file in the /conf directory to /etc/ruse.conf. The latter is the default configuration file path, and can be manually specified using the command-line -c switch. Also Ruse reloads its configuration file when it receives the SIGHUP signal.

The configuration file is in JSON format, and accepts various configuration options, please see the tables below for further reference:

Configuration file - Primary Keys

Key Name	Type	Default value(s)	Supported value(s) / Description
Hostname	optional	localhost	valid hostname or IPv4/IPv6 address¹
Protocols	optional	plain	plain, tls
Port	optional	8000	0-65535
TLSPort	optional	8443	0-65535
TLSKey	optional	server.key	a valid PEM encoded private key file
TLSCert	optional	server.crt	a valid X.509 certificate chain file
Root	optional	/var/www	root directory for static content
Index	optional		directory index file²
Verbose	optional	0	0(off), 1(low), 2(medium), 3(high)
Logfile	optional		readable and writable log file
Proxy	optional		see Proxy array's keys table below
VirtualHost	optional		see VirtualHost array's keys table

¹ IP Addresses

Enter a valid IP address to listen on. IPv6 addresses must be enclosed in square brackets []. Use the special values 0.0.0.0/0 or [::0] to listen on all interfaces.

² Directory Index

Use an empty "" string value as the index page to enable recursive directory listing.

---

Configuration file - Proxy Array's Keys

Key Name	Type	Default value(s)	Supported value(s) / Description
Type	optional		only 'reverse' is actually supported
Description	optional		administrative description of the proxy
Match	required		see Match object's keys table below
Target	required		valid http:// or https:// schemes URI

---

Configuration file - Match Object's Keys

Key Name	Type	Default value(s)	Supported value(s) / Description
UserAgent	optional		an array of User-Agent string(s) or Regular Expression(s)³
Network	optional		an array or list of network(s) in CIDR notation⁴

Configuration file - VirtualHost Array's Keys

Key Name	Type	Default value(s)	Supported value(s) / Description
Hostname	optional	localhost	valid hostname or IPv4/IPv6 address¹
Root	optional		root directory for static content
Index	optional		directory index file²
Proxy	optional		see Proxy array's keys table above

³ Regular Expression Matching

You can leverage Regular Expressions for matching HTTP User-Agent header field's values. Use the special tilde ~ character followed by a valid regular expression.

⁴ CIDR Invert Matching

You can negate CIDR networks matching using the exclamation mark ! character.

Contributing

If you find this project useful and want to contribute, we will be more than happy to receive your contribution in the form of code, documentation and even bug reports. To contribute code, feel free to fork this project and send your pull request(s).