TheCave - bitup19
by devploit
0x01 Challenge:
Level: Easy/Medium
Description:
The Cave
Perro malo!! Este año te quedas en casa!! DONDE VAS?! El perro de Bitup es muy travieso, se ha llevado la flag de este reto, y se ha ido corriendo al fondo de “la cueva”. Le gusta enterrar cosas en “hoyos” donde nadie pueda verlas y luego meterse el dentro. Puedes tocarlo, tranqui, no hace nada. https://cave.bitupalicante.com Agradecimiento a JoMoZa por su colaboración con este reto.
0x02 Write-up:
We start by visiting the URL where we can see a static website with psychedelic background.
If we check the source code we can see an interesting path commented.
This new path has a series of parameters that are based on the options we click on.
To correctly verify everything we can do about these parameters, we will use Burp Suite <3.
As soon as we start playing with the repeater we see that we are going to have a WAF stopping our attempts.
From here, I discovered two ways to solve them, depending on whether you are normal or as stubborn as me :)
0x02-1 Concat linux commands:
Investigating for a while we could have realized that commands can be concatenated without the WAF getting in the way we see.
Flag: bitup19{Unexp3ct3d_eval(uat3)}
0x02-2 Bypassing WAF with XOR operations:
As I said, I am a stubborn so I focused on bypassing the WAF and getting PHP functions on the server. For this, after a few hours of attempts, I saw that I could send the functions in XOR operations using “^” operator to evade the filter and use strings that are not allowed.
Example: system(ls) –> (“zznrno”^”9EXCya”^”0FEErc”)((“zd”^”qN”^”gY”))
Executing system(ls):
Executing our XOR bypass:
How PHP treats our payload:
–
Why does PHP treat our payload as a string?
The ^ is the exclusive or operator, which means that we’re in reality working with binary values. So lets break down what happens.
The XOR operator on binary values will return 1 where just one of the bits were 1, otherwise it returns 0 (0^0 = 0, 0^1 = 1, 1^0 = 1, 1^1 = 0). When you use XOR on characters, you’re using their ASCII values. These ASCII values are integers, so we need to convert those to binary to see what’s actually going on.
A = 65 = 1000001
S = 83 = 1010011
B = 66 = 1000010
A 1000001
^
S 1010011
^
B 1000010
----------------
result 0010010 = 80 = P
A^S^B = P
If we do an ‘echo “A”^”S”^”B”;’ PHP will return us a P as we see.
–
Curiously I have not found any tool to exploit this type of bypass (which I think could be useful in front of several WAFs), so I created a github repo with this tool so you can use it as you want. It is very simple but it can help in more than one situation.
Finally, with the use of this tool, getting the flag would be as easy as we see in the following image.
Flag: bitup19{Unexp3ct3d_eval(uat3)}