リモコン (Rimokon)

Highly customizible, expandable (via plugins) Telegram bot that gives remote access to the device it is running on (both in terms of shell commands and interaction with graphics, for instance, emulating keystrokes).

First run

• Install dependencies (the use of virtual environment is suggested, as below)

  python3 -m venv venv
  source venv/bin/activate
  pip3 install -r requirements.txt

• Create a Telegram bot via @BotFather and acquire the API Token.

• Copy Rimokon/config.py.example to Rimokon/config.py and edit it according to your prefernces.
  You might want to install xdotool/ydotool or a similar utility for keyboard manipulations.

• Ready to run! Start Rimokon with rimokon_main.py in the environment with the dependencies you installed.

  If you are already inside the environment, run python3 rimokon_main.py. If you are outside the environment, specify the path to the python interpreter inside venv: from the project directory run venv/bin/python3 rimokon_main.py or, from another directory, run path/to/project/venv/bin/python3 path/to/project/rimokon_main.py.

• Optionally, add Rimokon to system startup.

Plugins, actions, and aliases

Plugins are python packages stored under Rimokon/plugins/, which export some functions of the signature f(bot: telebot.TeleBot, message: telebot.types.Message, rest: str) -> Any. It will be called with three positional arguments: bot object to perform actions, the message that triggered the action, and the string containing the part of the command after the action name.

To enable a package, put it to the Rimokon/plugins/ directory, import it in your Rimokon/config.py and include it to the actions dictionary.

Aliases are, roughly speaking, user-defined actions. They may take the form of a string (e.g. 'key': 'run xdotool key' causes commands like key space be interpreted like run xdotool key space) or an action-like function, in which case they behave just like the usual actions (e.g. 'echo': lambda bot, msg, rest: bot.reply_to(msg, rest) will make the command echo 123 456 789 produce the response 123 456 789).

To enable an alias, define it in your Rimokon/config.py in the aliases dictionary.

Adavnced usage, technical plugins details, ...

More detailed docs are coming (hopefully, soon) in the GitHub wikis... But not yet 😔. Meanwhile, feel free to spam in the issues.

Security

Because this bot allows arbitrary code execution on the device it is running on, of course, you should only allow access to it (admins_ids in the config file) to trusted accounts. Still, should you have any kind of runtime security threat, for example, if one of the admin accounts gets compromised, it is possible to perform the emergency shutdown.

Emergency shutdown

To shut the bot down, user must send the command that they define in the config.py file. Unlike other commands, this command must exactly match the configured string (e.g. lowercase/capital letters mismatch are not allowed), except for the leading and trailing whitespaces (they are ignored). This will prevent the bot from accepting new requests (the bot will exit and it won't resume until you restart it manually), but the child processes started by previous requests won't be killed.

It is also possible (and recommended) to configure the bot to accept the emergency shutdown command from all users, not just the admins. This is useful in case an admin looses access to their account to a malicious user.

Note that it is perfectly fine to stop the bot with a usual keyboard interrupt. The shutdown command is intended for a case of emergency.

After emergency shutdown

Even if some commands were sent to the bot after it was stopped, Telegram maintains (for a limited time) the queue of messages not yet processed by the bot. So, if when starting the bot next time, the malefactor remains in the admins list (e.g. if a real admin account was compromised but then restored), the bot might still receive the malicious commands, even if the corresponding messages were deleted.

Besides, it is possible that the emergency shutdown command itself is not marked as processed (because the bot tries to stop itself ASAP), so it might receive this command again when runned next time (and, therefore, exit immediately).

Thus, it is recommended to run after_shutdown.py after emergency shutdown of the bot before it is restarted. It will print all the queued messages (if any) and new incoming messages, while it is running, clearing the queue on the Telegram side. After that just stop this process and run main.py as usually.

Contributing

You are very welcome to contribute! Do you have a question? Ask me! Have you found a bug or identified a flaw? Tell me about it (e.g. file an issue)! Do you have a feture request/idea? Let's discuss it (e.g. file in issue)! Want to implement something (e.g. Windows graphical environment support)? Do so, and submit a pull request!