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LFI to RCE using PHAR files while bypassing disabled_functions, followed by abuse of SUID and sudo.
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LFI to RCE using PHAR files while bypassing disabled_functions, followed by abuse of SUID and sudo.
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As per usual, we knock out a quick nmap:
It appears to be running Apache on Ubuntu, including a webserber titled Is My Website Up?
A quick look on the IP gives us a basic page. It appears to be an application that checks for you whether or not a website it up:
We can see at the bottom that siteisup.htb is the domain, so we add it to /etc/hosts. The website we are served, however, is still the same.
I listen with sudo nc -nvlp 80 but if we put in our IP, we get an interesting message:
If we put in http:// it works, though. There is probably some check to detect the protocol the request uses. It does appear to just be a GET request
Nothing of note here, except confirmation that the domain is siteisup.htb. On the website there is a massive delay and it says it's down:
This makes sense as we are not sending a response, so it has no way of telling. If we instead serve port 80 with a python SimpleHTTPServer, which has a response, we are told it's up:
There is once again no additional data:
If we turn on Debug Mode, the website prints out the headers and the HTML data.
We can also realise that we can use http://127.0.0.1 as input so SSRF could be possible. If we try and use other wrappers like file:// or php:// then it breaks and we get the Hacking attempt was detected ! message again.
We can run some brute force scripts in the background for files and directories while we probe manually:
Gobuster detects that there is a /dev directory! This looks like the only useful thing it finds, as basically everything else is status code 403. Connection to /dev just loads up a blank page with no information.
But what if we bruteforce under /dev? In fact, we hit the jackpot - there's a .git directory!
The contents are interesting. First we see index.php, which looks like this:
Essentially, it checks the page parameter; if it doesn't contain strings like bin or etc, it will append .php to the end and serve it back. If it does, it simply renders checker.php. checker.php is the file for the main page we see on a normal connectiong, which checks if a website is up or not.
There is clearly LFI here, but made slightly more difficult by the blacklist and the addition of .php onto the end of a filename.
Additionally, we can dump more details from Git using the git log command. A couple of intersting commits come up if that happens:
There is very potentially some interesting information in .htpasswd and .htaccess, and the mention of a dev vhost is useful too - there may be a dev.siteisup.htb. We'll add this to our hosts file, but if we try to connect, it tells us it's Forbidden to access that resource. We've at least confirmed that the subdomain exists and is treated differently.
If we checkout the commit 8812785e31c879261050e72e20f298ae8c43b565 using git checkout, we can see that .htpasswdexists, but it's empty:
.htaccess is much more intersting:
This tells us there is a special header that needs to be set called Special-Dev with the value only4dev. COnsidering the description of the commit is New technique in header to protect our dev vhost and dev.siteisup.htb is Forbidden, it's likely for that. We can check using BurpSuite:
And it looks like it is!
To make it easier for us, we're gonna get BurpSuite to add the header for us with its proxy (thanks to ippsec for this!). We can go to Match and Replace under Proxy Options:
And we can access it successfully in the browser:
Fiddling around with the website, we realise it reflects the git repository perfectly - the hyperlink for the Admin Page adds ?page=admin to the request, which then spits out the contents of admin.php. Clearly, the LFI works.
A logical route here would be to upload our own file and then LFI it for RCE. However, there are two issues with this.
Firstly, the server checks the file extension, and denies uploading a fair few of them:
Secondly, the server appends .php to the page parameter of the GET request:
We have to somehow bypass these restrictions to get proper LFI.
If we have a proper look at the code, we realise that it all happens very quickly:
So after all the checks, it:
Uploads it to uploads/, under a folder by time
Reads all the lines in the file, putting them into a list
Queries each element of the list to see if it's up
Deletes the file
So it seems like it expects a list of websites to check, then once that's done deletes them immediately.
Note that if the webserver doesn't respond, it hangs for a period of time - this is the massive delay we noticed right away. We can use this to our advantage and keep the server running, leaving the file up.
We make a very simple test.php:
As we predicted, the server rejects the file. If we rename it to test.txt and try again, the upload is successful. If we go to http://dev.siteisup.htb/uploads/, we see the file gets deleted immediately. Let's add our own IP and see if it hangs long enough for us to actually get it:
Still nothing. The resposne is very quick on the original site, so it probably detected the socket was closed. If we open the socket but don't respond, for example with netcat, it might delay:
And now if we run over to uploads we can see the file!
We can actually also add the -k flag to the above nc command to keep the listening persist over multiple connections. I'll have this running in the background while I tinker with what can be done.
The way this works is that we can have a file with the .php extension, then in the page parameter of the GET request we can use the phar:// wrapper to access the PHP file inside it.
We'll make test.php really simple to start with:
We then compress it into a phar file:
The upload works! Let's try and access the file itself. In BurpSuite, we'll use Repeater to query for the file. Note that the server appends the .php for us - that's half the reason we have to do it this way! So don't include the extension in the page parameter.
It worked! Now let's do a crazier command, like system("ls"):
A basic reverse shell to port 4000. Let's do the exact same thing and pray it works.
Which it does! We upgrade the shell quickly using
A quick check in /home tells us there is a developer user. If we go into their home directory then /dev, there is a SUID binary named siteisup with the source code siteisup.py. We can read siteisup.py:
We can immediately spot this is python2, and even more importantly it's using input() in python2 - which can easily lead to code execution. If we run ./siteisup, we get prompted for the URL. If we enter a simple os.system command, we get a response:
Aside from the errors, we can see it works! Now we can run __import__('os').system('bash') and get a shell as developer. I'll grab the id_rsa in .ssh, call it dev.key and SSH in:
And now we have a shell as developer and can read user.txt!
We can check our sudo permissions:
And from there we easily read root.txt.
It's not all wrappers that get blocked, as ippsec showed in , as ftp and gopher both work fine.
We'll use a tool called to dump the contents of the Git repo:
PHP has its own archives called phar files, where you essentially package up PHP files into a zip file. The cool thing about a phar file is that we can .
Huh, it's an Internal Server Error. Considering that the previous attempt worked well, chances are . This is done using disabled_functions, and we can check by running phpinfo(), so let's do that:
There are a lot of disabled functions, but one that is not disabled is proc_open(). This can be found using the tool , as recommended by and . A proc_open() reverse shell can be pretty simple:
We have sudo permissions to run easy_install. We can use:
