We were testing a black-box service for a client with an interesting software platform. They'd provided an SDK with minimal documentation—just enough to show basic usage, but none of the underlying service definitions. The SDK binary was obfuscated, and the gRPC endpoints it connected to had reflection disabled.

After spending too much time piecing together service names from SDK string dumps and network traces, we built grpc-scan to automate what we were doing manually: exploiting how gRPC implementations handle invalid requests to enumerate services without any prior knowledge.

Unlike REST APIs where you can throw curl at an endpoint and see what sticks, gRPC operates over HTTP/2 using binary Protocol Buffers. Every request needs:

• The exact service name (case-sensitive)
• The exact method name (also case-sensitive)
• Properly serialized protobuf messages

Miss any of these and you get nothing useful. There's no OPTIONS request, typically limited documentation, no guessing /api/v1/users might exist. You either have the proto files or you're blind.

Most teams rely on server reflection—a gRPC feature that lets clients query available services. But reflection is usually disabled in production. It’s an information disclosure risk, yet developers rarely provide alternative documentation.

But gRPC have varying error messages which inadvertently leak service existence through different error codes:

# Calling non-existent\`unknown service FakeService``real service, wrong method``unknown method FakeMethod for service UserService``real service and method``missing authentication token`

These distinct responses let us map the attack surface. The tool automates this process, testing thousands of potential service/method combinations based on various naming patterns we've observed.

The enumeration engine does a few things

1. Even when reflection is "disabled," servers often still respond to reflection requests with errors that confirm the protocol exists. We use this for fingerprinting.

2. For a base word like "User", we generate likely services

• User
• UserService
• Users
• UserAPI
• user.User
• api.v1.User
• com.company.User

Each pattern tested with common method names: Get, List, Create, Update, Delete, Search, Find, etc.

3. Different gRPC implementations return subtly different error codes:

• UNIMPLEMENTED vs NOT_FOUND for missing services
• INVALID_ARGUMENT vs INTERNAL for malformed requests
• Timing differences between auth checks and method validation

4. gRPC's HTTP/2 foundation means we can multiplex hundreds of requests over a single TCP connection. The tool maintains a pool of persistent connections, improving scan speed.

What do we commonly see in pentests using RPC?

Service Sprawl from Migrations

SDK analysis often reveals parallel service implementations, for example

• UserService - The original monolith endpoint
• AccountManagementService - New microservice, full auth
• UserDataService - Read-only split-off, inconsistent auth
• UserProfileService - Another team's implementation

These typically emerge from partial migrations where different teams own different pieces. The older services often bypass newer security controls.

Method Proliferation and Auth Drift

Real services accumulate method variants over time, for example

• GetUser - Original, added auth in v2
• GetUserDetails - Different team, no auth check
• FetchUserByID - Deprecated but still active
• GetUserWithPreferences - Calls GetUser internally, skips auth

So newer methods that compose older ones sometimes bypass security checks the original methods later acquired.

Package Namespace Archaeology

Service discovery reveals organizational history

• ‍com.startup.api.Users - Original service
• ‍platform.users.v1.UserAPI - Post-merge standardization attempt
• ‍internal.batch.UserBulkService - "Internal only" but on same endpoint

Each namespace generation typically has different security assumptions. Internal services exposed on the same port as public APIs are surprisingly common—developers assume network isolation that doesn't exist.

Limitations

• Services expecting specific protobuf structures still require manual work. We can detect UserService/CreateUser exists, but crafting a valid User message requires either the proto definition or guessing or reverse engineering of the SDK's serialization.
• The current version focuses on unary calls. Bidirectional streaming (common in real-time features) needs different handling.

Available at https://github.com/Adversis/grpc-scan. Pull requests welcome.

Native Modules

Compiled Node.js files (.node files) are compiled binary files that allow Node.js applications to interface with native code written in languages like C, C++, or Objective-C as native addon modules.

Unlike JavaScript files which are mostly readable, assuming they’re not obfuscated and minified, .node files are compiled binaries that can contain machine code and run with the same privileges as the Node.js process that loads them, without the constraints of the JavaScript sandbox. These extensions can directly call system APIs and perform operations that pure JavaScript code cannot, like making system calls.

These addons can use Objective-C++ to leverage native macOS APIs directly from Node.js. This allows arbitrary code execution outside the normal sandboxing that would constrain a typical Electron application.

ASAR Integrity

When an Electron application uses a module that contains a compiled .node file, it automatically loads and executes the binary code within it. Many Electron apps use the ASAR (Atom Shell Archive) file format to package the application's source code. ASAR integrity checking is a security feature that checks the file integrity and prevents tampering with files within the ASAR archive. It is disabled by default.

When ASAR integrity is enabled, your Electron app will verify the header hash of the ASAR archive on runtime. If no hash is present or if there is a mismatch in the hashes, the app will forcefully terminate.

This prevents files from being modified within the ASAR archive. Note that it appears the integrity check is a string that you can regenerate after modifying files, then find and replace in the executable file as well. See more here.

But many applications run from outside the verified archive, under app.asar.unpacked since the compiled .node files (the native modules) cannot be executed directly from within an ASAR archive.

And so even with the proper security features enabled, a local attacker can modify or replace .node files within the unpacked directory - not so different than DLL hijacking on Windows.

We wrote two tools - one to find Electron applications that aren’t hardened against this, and one to simply compile Node.js addons.

1. Electron ASAR Scanner - A tool that assesses whether Electron applications implement ASAR integrity protection and useful .node files
2. NodeLoader - A simple native Node.js addon compiler capable of launching macOS applications and shell commands

An interactive application that visualizes and demonstrates Google’s CaMeL (Capabilities for Machine Learning) security approach for defending against prompt injections in LLM agents.

Link to original paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.18813

All credit to the original researchers

 title={Defeating Prompt Injections by Design}, author={Edoardo Debenedetti and Ilia Shumailov and Tianqi Fan and Jamie Hayes and Nicholas Carlini and Daniel Fabian and Christoph Kern and Chongyang Shi and Andreas Terzis and Florian Tramèr}, year={2025}, eprint={2503.18813}, archivePrefix={arXiv}, primaryClass={cs.CR}, url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.18813}, }