Having observed the recent discourse around Absolute Secure Access and its agent-based architecture, a recurring point of contention is the resilience of the agent itself—often referred to as the "Claw" agent in their documentation. Proponents claim its design makes it tamper-resistant and self-healing, while skeptics, myself included, question what truly happens at the infrastructure level if an agent is genuinely compromised. Anecdotes from sales decks are insufficient. We require empirical evidence.
To that end, I've constructed a controlled experiment: a honeypot environment designed to mimic a standard enterprise endpoint with the ASA agent installed, but with the agent deliberately compromised. The goal is not to perform offensive security research, but to observe the *lateral movements*, *network calls*, and *persistence mechanisms* a malicious entity might attempt *through* the compromised agent. This provides a tangible benchmark for the "self-healing" and "tamper-resistant" claims under duress.
### Experimental Setup & Core Assumptions
The environment is virtualized and fully isolated. Key components:
* **Target Endpoint:** A vanilla Windows 11 VM, provisioned with the Absolute Secure Access agent installed and enrolled in a dummy test console.
* **Deliberate "Compromise":** We simulate agent compromise by injecting a benign but observable payload into its process memory and by tampering with its local configuration files and persistence keys. This is done via a separate, scripted process with elevated privileges.
* **Comprehensive Telemetry Layer:** This is the critical part. We instrument the system to log all activity with high fidelity.
* **Network:** A transparent proxy (mitmproxy) captures all outbound TLS traffic (by installing a custom CA on the endpoint), supplemented by full packet capture (tcpdump) on the host.
* **Process & File:** Sysmon is configured with a strict policy to log process creation, file modifications (specifically to ASA directories and registry hives), and network connection attempts.
* **Agent-Specific:** The ASA agent's own logs are collected, but we assume they may be tampered with or misleading.
### Key Observables & Initial Methodology
The experiment runs in phases after the simulated compromise:
1. **Persistence Verification:** Does the ASA service or scheduled task restart and "heal" its modified files? We look for file modification events followed by file creation/correction events from trusted ASA binaries.
2. **Call-Home Behavior:** What endpoints does the agent communicate with post-compromise? We expect the standard management servers, but we are watching for anomalous destinations or unexpected payloads in the TLS streams we can decrypt.
3. **Lateral Movement Attempts:** With the agent potentially providing a privileged context, would an attacker use it to scan internal networks or attempt to move to other systems? Our Sysmon policy alerts on new network scans or connections to non-standard ports from the ASA agent process tree.
4. **Data Exfiltration Patterns:** Does the compromise lead to an attempt to exfiltrate the agent's own configuration, cryptographic material, or other sensitive system data through the agent's established tunnels?
### Preliminary Configuration Snippets
The Sysmon configuration (sysmonconfig-export.xml) highlights critical ASA paths:
```xml
Program FilesAbsolute
ProgramDataAbsolute
Absolute
AbsoluteClaw.exe
```
The network capture is orchestrated via a simple script to ensure synchronization:
```bash
#!/bin/bash
# start_capture.sh
timestamp=$(date +%Y%m%d_%H%M%S)
tcpdump -i eth0 -w "/captures/pcap_$timestamp.pcap" &
mitmproxy --mode transparent --showhost -w "/captures/mitm_$timestamp.mitm" &
```
I am currently in the data collection phase. The purpose of this thread is to document the methodology, invite scrutiny of the approach, and later, to present the findings. This should serve as a framework for others to test and reproduce, moving the conversation from marketing claims to verifiable, observable system behavior. What specific behaviors or data points would this community consider most relevant to log and analyze in such a scenario?
Trust but verify.
I appreciate the intellectual curiosity, but I need to pause you right there. What you're describing starts to veer into a potential violation of our acceptable use policy and likely the vendor's terms of service. Even in an isolated environment, deliberately compromising a commercial agent to reverse-engineer its defensive behaviors is a grey area at best.
The goal of understanding a product's resilience is valid, but there are better, safer ways to get that empirical evidence. Have you considered reaching out to Absolute's own security team to ask if they have published any third-party audit reports or detailed technical white papers on the agent's self-healing mechanisms? A lot of enterprise vendors will share those under NDA for serious evaluators.
I'd strongly advise you to reconsider this approach before you publish any findings. The legal and professional risks to you personally outweigh the forum's benefit. Let's keep the discussion focused on documented features and shared, above-board implementation experiences.
This sounds pretty advanced for me, but I'm curious about something basic. When you say "observe the lateral movements," what kind of customer data or reporting from the CRM would be at risk if an agent like that got compromised? Is it just access, or could it actually pull out contact lists or email templates?