Glossary

The words Prosperous uses. For the vocabulary the whole collection shares - standard ELF, and the words that mean different things in different repositories - see the collection's glossary. For the file formats, see SELFish's.

target is defined for the whole collection in CONVENTIONS.md ยง2: one machine Prosperous has registered, by name and address. It is the word this project uses most, and it is not repeated here.

What is running over there

Prosperous does not put software on a console. It speaks to services somebody else's exploit chain already started, and invents no protocol of its own. DESIGN.md has the full picture; the names you will meet:

Name What it is
elfldr Send it an ELF, it runs it. The one everything else goes through, which makes it a single point of failure that fails invisibly
pldmgr The payload manager. Launches things - through elfldr
klogsrv The kernel log, read over a socket
shsrv A shell
ftpsrv File transfer, which is how anything gets copied

Payload - a plain ELF sent to a target to be run. Not a package, not installed: mapped and executed.

The concepts this project added

Chain - what the target loads when it comes back. A health check says what is answering now, which is a different question with a similar-looking answer: a service can be running today and absent after the next power cycle, because it was never in the boot list. The payload manager reads that list in order from a file, and a tool that reports "klogsrv is not loaded" without adding "and it is not in the list either" has left out the useful half.

Autoload - that boot list, and the settings around it. The path is a measured constant rather than a parameter, because it was observed on a target rather than reasoned about - the distinction the whole project turns on.

Doctor - health checks that say what is wrong and exactly what would put it right. A finding with no remedy is half a finding.

Scan root - a directory an auto-mounter watches. Drop a title directory there and it gets registered; it is not the directory titles are registered to, which is never scanned, so a copy placed there is inert.

Portable mode - put an empty .portable directory beside the binaries and both programs keep their data there rather than in a user profile. A copy on a stick stays a copy on a stick.

Porthole - the planned first-party capture and input path: our own video out and our own controller state in, over our own payload, so watching and playing a jailbroken target never speaks the vendor's remote-play protocol. The host half exists; the target payload is a scaffold that compiles and is deliberately not linked. See VIDEO.md part three.

The two programs

pros - the command line. pros-gui - the window. They do nearly the same things on purpose: a capability in only one of them is a capability that gets forgotten.

Words that mean something else next door

Shape, check, corpus and probe all carry other senses in obSCEne and orbistoun. The collection glossary has the collisions in one table.

Where the rest is