ridter/tshtun — explained in plain English
Analysis updated 2026-08-04 · repo last pushed 2022-08-15
Security researchers can study the code to understand how encrypted command-and-control channels work under the hood.
Penetration testers can use it as a reference implementation when demonstrating remote command execution on an assessment.
Network defenders can analyze the traffic patterns to learn what encrypted remote control channels look like on a network.
| ridter/tshtun | busung-dev/cve-2026-43499-s25u | cocoonstack/scrcpy-rfb | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stars | 28 | 28 | 28 |
| Language | C | C | C |
| Last pushed | 2022-08-15 | — | — |
| Maintenance | Dormant | — | — |
| Setup difficulty | hard | hard | hard |
| Complexity | 4/5 | 5/5 | 4/5 |
| Audience | researcher | developer | developer |
Figures from each repo's GitHub metadata at analysis time.
No setup documentation is provided, users must read the source code to figure out how to compile the C client and run the Python components.
This project, tshtun, recreates the communication method used by a tool called tsh, which lets one computer remotely control another through a command-line interface. Specifically, it focuses on handling the encrypted traffic between the two machines so that the commands and responses stay hidden while traveling across the network. At a high level, the project pairs a small C program with Python scripts. The C program, compiled from shell.c, runs on the target machine and provides the interactive command line. The Python side, found in the libs folder, manages the process of encrypting and decrypting the data that flows back and forth. This separation lets the author write the traffic-handling logic in Python while keeping the on-target component lightweight in C. Security researchers and penetration testers are the likely audience here. When assessing a network, they often need to demonstrate that they can run commands on a remote machine and that those commands can't be easily spotted or read by network monitoring tools. This project gives them a working example of how that encrypted command-and-control channel looks under the hood, built on the design of the well-known tsh utility. The README is quite sparse and doesn't document setup steps, configuration, or usage instructions beyond pointing to the source files and referencing two upstream tsh projects. Anyone using it would need to read the code itself to understand how to compile the C client and run the Python components.
A proof-of-concept tool that lets one computer run commands on another remotely through an encrypted channel, recreating the design of a known utility called tsh. It pairs a lightweight C program with Python scripts that handle the encryption.
Mainly C. The stack also includes C, Python.
Dormant — no commits in 2+ years (last push 2022-08-15).
No license is mentioned in the repository, so default copyright restrictions apply and usage rights are unclear.
Setup difficulty is rated hard, with roughly 1h+ to a first successful run.
Mainly researcher.
This repo across BitVibe Labs
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