I solved this gitlab box the unintended way by exploiting the git pull command running as root and using git post-merge hooks to execute code as root. I was able to get a root shell using this method but I still had to get an initial shell by finding the gitlab credentials in some obfuscated javascript and modifying PHP code in the repo to get RCE.
Craft was a fun Silicon Valley themed box where we have to exploit a vulnerable REST API eval function call to get RCE. After getting a shell on the app container, we escalate to a user shell on the host OS by finding credentials and SSH private keys. To gain root access, we have to generate an OTP token with the vault software installed on the machine.
Just its predecessor, Smasher2 is a very difficult box with reverse engineering and binary exploitation. Unfortunately, the initial step required some insane brute-forcing which took part of the fun out of this one for me. I solved the authentication bypass part using an unintended method: The code compares the password against the username instead of the password in the configuration file so by guessing the username I also had the password and could log in. I had to do some WAF evasion to get my payload uploaded and land a shell. Then the final part of the box is exploiting a kernel driver mmap handler to change the credential structure in memory of my current user to get root access.
Wall is running a vulnerable version of the Centreon application that allows authenticated users to gain RCE. The tricky part of this box was finding the path to the application since it’s not something that normally shows up in the wordlists I use with gobuster. The intended way was to bypass the HTTP basic auth by using a POST then the redirection contained a link to the centreon page but instead I did some recon on the box creator’s website and saw that he had written an exploit for Centreon and guessed the path accordingly. The priv esc was the same used on Flujab: a vulnerability in screen that allows the attacker to write to any file on the system.
Heist starts off with a support page with a username and a Cisco IOS config file containing hashed & encrypted passwords. After cracking two passwords from the config file and getting access to RPC on the Windows machine, I find additional usernames by RID cycling and then password spray to find a user that has WinRM access. Once I have a shell, I discover a running Firefox process and dump its memory to disk so I can do some expert-level forensics (ie: running strings) to find the administrator password.
I learned a bit about Ethereum and smart contracts while doing the Chainsaw box from Hack the Box. There’s a command injection vulnerability in a smart contract that gives me a shell. Then after doing some googling on IPFS filesystem, I find an encrypted SSH key for another user which I can crack. To get root access I use another smart contract to change the password used by a SUID binary running as root, then find the flag hidden in the slack space for root.txt
Networked was an easy box that starts off with a classic insecure upload vulnerability in an image gallery web application. The Apache server is misconfigured and let me use a double extension to get remote code execution through my PHP script. To escalate to root, we have to find a command injection vulnerability in the script that checks for web application attacks, then exploit another script running as root that changes the ifcfg file.
The entrypoint for Jarvis is an SQL injection vulnerability in the web application to book hotel rooms. There is a WAF but I was able to easily get around it by lowering the amount of requests per second in sqlmap and changing the user-agent header. After landing a shell, I exploit a simple command injection to get access to another user then I use systemctl which has been set SUID root to create a new service and get root RCE.
Haystack is an easy ctf-like box where the initial credentials can be found hidden in an ElasticSearch database. Knowing some ES API syntax it’s very easy to retrieve the credentials then get an SSH shell. After exploiting CVE-2018-17246 in Kibana, I get another shell with user kibana who has read access on the configuration for logstash which is running as root. The logstash configuration will run as root any command placed in a specific logstash directory/file so once I figured that out it was easy to get a root shell.
Safe was a bit of a surprise because I didn’t expect a 20 points box to start with a buffer overflow requiring ropchains. The exploit is pretty straightforward since I have the memory address of the system function and I can call it to execute a shell. The privesc was a breeze: there’s a keepass file with a bunch of images in a directory. I simply loop through all the images until I find the right keyfile that I can use with John the Ripper to crack the password and recover the root password from the keepass file.