: This is currently the industry standard for converting PE files (EXE, DLL, .NET) into position-independent shellcode. According to researchers at TheWover/donut , it works by creating a VBS/JS/EXE bootstrap that decrypts and loads the original payload directly into memory.
Created by security researcher Hasherezade, pe2shc is one of the most popular tools for this task. It restructures the executable so that the PE header itself doubles as valid, executable redirect code.
The conversion of EXEs to shellcode is not merely an academic exercise—it appears in real-world malware campaigns and advanced persistent threat (APT) operations.
byte[] shellcode = new byte[] /* paste your shellcode here */ ; convert exe to shellcode
: A tool by hasherezade that converts a PE file into a format that can be injected and run as shellcode while remaining a valid PE file.
: The computed hash is compared against precomputed hashes for functions like LoadLibraryA and GetProcAddress . When a match is found, the function's address is retrieved and stored.
Forcepoint Labs documented a multi-stage XWorm campaign using encrypted shellcode, steganography, and reflective DLL loads to deploy malware without leaving obvious files on disk. The campaign used an encrypted shellcode that executed a .NET dropper and reflectively loaded multiple in-memory DLLs. : This is currently the industry standard for
using System; using System.Runtime.InteropServices;
: For custom implementations, developers write a "stub" in assembly or C. This stub parses the PE headers of the embedded EXE, allocates memory using VirtualAlloc , maps the sections, and resolves imports before jumping to the EntryPoint. 3. Implementation Workflow
// Example snippet to access the PEB and find Kernel32.dll Base Address #include #include ULONG_ptr GetKernel32Address() PPEB peb; #if defined(_WIN64) peb = (PPEB)__readgsqword(0x60); #else peb = (PPEB)__readfsdword(0x30); #endif PLDR_DATA_TABLE_ENTRY moduleList = (PLDR_DATA_TABLE_ENTRY)peb->Ldr->Reserved2[1]; // Iterating through loaded modules to find kernel32.dll... // (Implementation requires parsing module names) return (ULONG_ptr)moduleList->DllBase; Use code with caution. Step 2: Configure the Compiler (Visual Studio / MSVC) It restructures the executable so that the PE
#!/usr/bin/env python3 import sys
For most operators and researchers, writing an entire application natively in position-independent assembly is highly inefficient. Instead, automated tools wrapper an existing EXE inside a custom position-independent loader.
: The converted shellcode must replicate the PE's section layout in memory, preserving proper permissions (executable, readable, writable) for each section.
# Convert to shellcode format shellcode = ''.join(f'\\xbyte:02x' for byte in data)