jsonproc

A read-only /proc to json bridge. In general, the URL scheme looks like:

/           # Everything in /proc
/loadavg    # The contents of /proc/loadavg
/proc/1     # All About Init

When hitting a directory, you should expect a blob that looks like this:

{ 
  "path": "/proc/sys/",
  "files": [],
  "dirs": ["abi", "debug", "dev", "fs", "kernel", "net", "vm"]
}

When hitting a file, you should expect a blob that looks like this:

{
  "path": "/proc/loadavg",
  "contents": "0.09 0.12 0.17 1/613 4319\n"
}

Errors are signaled both by the appearance of the "err" field, and with a 500 code:

$ curl -v localhost:9234/x; echo
* Connected to localhost (127.0.0.1) port 9234 (#0)
> GET /x HTTP/1.1
> Host: localhost:9234
> Accept: */*
> 
< HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server Error
< Date: Sun, 05 Jul 2015 06:27:06 GMT
< Content-Length: 66
< Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8

{"path":"/proc/x","err":"stat /proc/x: no such file or directory"}

The contents of "err" are not guaranteed to be stable.

Installing

Checking out the source code and running 'go build' should be sufficient to get you a binary. There should also be a linux/amd64 binary courtesy of Travis CI attached to each release on Github.

Usage

./jsonproc -listen 10.9.8.7:9234

will get you a /proc-to-json gateway running on port 9234, listening on a local address. In general, you should prefer to explicitly bind jsonproc to a non-routable address- /proc leaks all sorts of information.

Notes around the design

The goal is to quit writing one-off exfiltrations for things in /proc. So jsonproc needs to be lightweight, safe, and reasonably performant.

By default, you can only read the first 4MB of files, and the first 1024 entries of a directory. These limitations are designed to make it more difficult to DOS yourself.

jsonproc does nothing special around permissions. If you would like to read files that are root-readable only, running this as root should work. Because it's written in a memory-safe language, and never calls anything other that stat, open, read, and readdir, it's possible this isn't even that terrible an idea, but, uh, this should not be taken as an endorsement. Run it as an unprivileged user if possible.

Relative paths- ../ & company- are unsupported. You should be limited to /proc.