- Okay. Just gonna show you a quick demo
on what we think might be possible in the future.
We've done a little research on the shared memory links
between zCX and z/OS.
We know they exist.
They're in some of the diagrams
and the documentation talks about it.
But we found one,
a particular instance we'd like to show you now.
So this demo is basically just giving you
kind of a window into what might be possible,
by way of just kind of a fun demonstration.
So if we log into our backdoor of our zCX instance,
so this is an SSH server that I booted up
that's just running on the root level
of the zCX instance now,
not bothering having to go back in through Docker
and escape down to the root instance.
We're just running an SSH daemon directly from it now
to get in and out.
It's part of our research environment.
And I'm gonna run some hackery commands
from the zCX instance that I'm not gonna show today.
And just to give you an example
of what we think is possible,
let's log back into the mainframe system.
So I'm going to go log in with my TSO ID onto our mainframe.
And once I'm into TSO,
I'm gonna launch ispf,
which is kind of the green screen
that everybody associates with mainframe
and is still probably the primary means
of accessing the mainframe.
And I'm gonna go into isdf,
which is where all the output for all the jobs is stored,
and look at one of our active jobs,
which is named MOON,
which is the zCX server that we're looking at.
So if I scroll down in this job log
and I go all the way down to the bottom,
you can see that there is definitely a connection
between the commands that I just executed in zCX
and my ability to write to memory inside of z/OS,
placing the goose there at the end of that job log.
So the demonstration here was basically just to show you
that what we have is,
what we've done is,
we've gone down through the Docker engine,
into the root Linux container,
what's labeled here as Linux kernel.
And that we know there are memory connections
between that kernel through the zCX hypervisor and z/OS.
And so our next project is really to try to figure out
how to take advantage of that
and do memory overwrites
and gain access, then, full access,
to an authorized address space within z/OS.
Doing so will give us access to then all of the data,
the programs, and everything running on z/OS,
which is ultimately the end goal.