Tunneling a network connection into a VMWare guest without network

Question

I'm trying to establish a TCP connection between a client machine and a guest VM running inside an ESXi server. The trick is that the guest VM has no network configured (intentionally). However the ESX server is on the network, so in theory it might be possible to bridge the gap with software.

Concretely, I'd like to eventually create a direct TCP connection from python code running on the client machine (I want to create an RPyC connection). However anything that results in ssh-like port tunneling would be breakthrough enough.

I'm theorizing that some combination of VMWare Tools, pysphere and obscure network adapters could be possible. But so far, my searches don't yield any result and my only ideas are either ugly (something like tunneling over file operations) and/or very error prone (basically, if I have to build a TCP stack, I know I'll be writing lots of bugs).

It's for a testing environment setup, not production; but I prefer stability over speed. I currently don't see much need for high throughput.

To summarize the setup:

• Client machine (Windows/Linux, whatever works) with vmware tools installed
• ESXi server (network accessible from client machine)
• VMWare guest which has no NICs at all, but is accessible using vmware tools (must be Windows in my case, but a Linux solution is welcome for the sake completeness)

Any ideas and further reading suggestions would be awesome. Thank you Internet, you are the best!

Answer 1

It's a bit late but a virtual serial port may be your friend. You can pick the serial port on the outer end via network or locally depending on your options. Than you can have some ppp stuff or your custom script on both ends to communicate. You could also run some tool to create a single socket from the serial link on the guest end if you want to avoid having a ppp interface but still need to tunnel a TCP connection for some application. This should keep you safe when analyzing malicious code as long as it's not skynet :-) You still should do it with the permission of the sysadmin as you may be violating your company's rules by working around some security measurements.

Answer 2

It is not clear the meaning of 'no NICs at all on guest'. If I can assume that, there is no physical NICs assigned for the guest is what is meant here. The solution is easy as a vmWare soft NIC can be provisioned for the guest VM and that will serve as the entry point to the guest netstack.

But if the soft NIC is also not available, i really wonder how and what can serve as the entry point to the netstack of guest, be it Linux/Windows. To my understanding, if thats what you meant, then you might need to make guest OS modifications to use a different door to access the guest netstack and to post/drain pkts from it. But again, when you do a proper implementation of this backdoor, it will become just another implementation of softNIC which vmware by default support. So, why not use that?

Answer 3

If the VM 'intentionally' has no network configured, you can't connect to it over a network.

Your question embodies a contradiction in terms.