Posts tagged natas

Last Monday, I presented my solutions to the Natas server-side security war games at NSLUG. Afterwards, I spent some time to clean up my code, and I’ve now published it to CPAN as Hack::Natas, which comes with modules and scripts to solve level 15 and 16 in an automated way, plus walkthroughs for all the levels up to 17 written in Markdown (those are almost the same as my blog posts, so you’re not missing out by looking at only one or the other).

Last Monday, I presented my solutions to the Natas server-side security war games at my local linux users’ group.

I recorded my talk, but it didn’t turn out well. I was using Google Hangouts for the first time, and I forgot that it only records the windows you tell it to. In the video, embedded below the fold, there’s a lot of talking about windows that were being projected, but which didn’t get recorded. Still, the audio counts for something, and you can see what I’m talking about much of the time.

This is the last level. We’re challenged with an improved version of level 9 – they’ve added additional “sanitation” to keep us out.

    if(preg_match('/[;|&`\'"]/',$key)) {
        print "Input contains an illegal character!";
    } else {
        passthru("grep -i \"$key\" dictionary.txt");
    }

We’re nearly at the end! This is the 2nd-last level.

We know there is a users table, with columns “username” and “password”. This time, the code just checks that the username exists. There’s no way to print out the data we want. Instead, we’ll have to do something cleverer.

In level 14, we see a more traditional username & password form. Let’s check the source code to see if there are holes we can slip through.

This is level 13. Looks like they claim to only accept image files, in order to close the flaw we used previously. I bet we can get around that restriction just like we did when they disallowed certain characters in the search term. Let’s examine the code.

Here’s the new part of the code:

    if (! exif_imagetype($_FILES['uploadedfile']['tmp_name'])) {
        echo "File is not an image";
    }

In level 12, we’re given a file upload form. Let’s take a look at the code that processes input.

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.