exploit - Dave's Blog

Stripe's web security CTF's level 0 and level 3 had SQL injection solutions described below.

Level 0

Code

app.get('/*', function(req, res) {
  var namespace = req.param('namespace');

  if (namespace) {
    var query = 'SELECT * FROM secrets WHERE key LIKE ? || ".%"';
    db.all(query, namespace, function(err, secrets) {

Issue

There's no input validation on the namespace parameter and it is injected into the SQL query with no encoding applied. This means you can use the '%' character as the namespace which is the wildcard character matching all secrets.

Notes

Code review red flag was using strings to query the database. Additional levels made this harder to exploit by using an API with objects to construct a query rather than strings and by running a query that only returned a single row, only ran a single command, and didn't just dump out the results of the query to the caller.

Level 3

Code

@app.route('/login', methods=['POST'])
def login():
    username = flask.request.form.get('username')
    password = flask.request.form.get('password')

    if not username:
        return "Must provide username\n"

    if not password:
        return "Must provide password\n"

    conn = sqlite3.connect(os.path.join(data_dir, 'users.db'))
    cursor = conn.cursor()

    query = """SELECT id, password_hash, salt FROM users
               WHERE username = '{0}' LIMIT 1""".format(username)
    cursor.execute(query)

    res = cursor.fetchone()
    if not res:
        return "There's no such user {0}!\n".format(username)
    user_id, password_hash, salt = res

    calculated_hash = hashlib.sha256(password + salt)
    if calculated_hash.hexdigest() != password_hash:
        return "That's not the password for {0}!\n".format(username)

Issue

There's little input validation on username before it is used to constrcut a SQL query. There's no encoding applied when constructing the SQL query string which is used to, given a username, produce the hashed password and the associated salt. Accordingly one can make username a part of a SQL query command which ensures the original select returns nothing and provide a new SELECT via a UNION that returns some literal values for the hash and salt. For instance the following in blue is the query template and the red is the username injected SQL code:

SELECT id, password_hash, salt FROM users WHERE username = 'doesntexist' UNION SELECT id, ('5e884898da28047151d0e56f8dc6292773603d0d6aabbdd62a11ef721d1542d8') AS password_hash, ('word') AS salt FROM users WHERE username = 'bob' LIMIT 1

Notes

Code review red flag is again using strings to query the database. Although this level was made more difficult by using an API that returns only a single row and by using the execute method which only runs one command. I was forced to (as a SQL noob) learn the syntax of SELECT in order to figure out UNION and how to return my own literal values.

Stripe is running a web security capture the flag - a series of increasingly difficult web security exploit challenges. I've finished it and had a lot of fun. Working on a web browser I knew the theory of these various web based attacks, but this was my first chance to put theory into practice with:

• No adverse consequences
• Knowledge that there is a fun security exploit to find
• Access to the server side source code

Here's a blog post on the CTF behind the scenes setup which has many impressive features including phantom users that can be XSS/CSRF'ed.

I'll have another post on my difficulties and answers for the CTF levels after the contest is over on Wed, but if you're looking for hints, try out the CTF chatroom or the level specific CTF chatroom.