So another thing that I tried out with some help from the guys I work with was this attack called XML Entity Injection. It has been around for quite a while and there are plenty of resources on it so I won't talk about it too much. Here is an OWASP reference and another link which was quite cool and explained things well.
In my previous post I described how to use SoapUI through Stunnel to test HTTPS web services. So following up on that, I was using SoapUI to test XXE attacks as well. So I followed stuff given above on the link to try and read the passwd file from the remote machine (which I'd confirmed was a Ubuntu box). To my pleasant surprise it immediately worked and the entire /etc/passwd file got displayed in the Soap response. Yay. Victory jig. And all that ;)
I was brought down to earth though when I saw an account called 'arvind' in the response. For some stupid reason, SoapUI was retrieving my own passwd file and displaying it in the response. Huh?
So I set Burp up again and set Intercept to on to see what was happening. To my surprise, the request itself already had my passwd file..and the response was just reflecting it back. So even before hitting my own client proxy SoapUI had done 'something' with my request, expanded my own entities and THEN sent it to Burp. It wasn't ever reaching the server directly. Meaning..if I used SoapUI there wasn't any way to directly test XXE...unless there was some tweak somewhere where I could turn off request parsing.
Anyway since I had Burp as well in my proxy chain before it hit the server, it didn't really matter and I could test it in Burp. Turned out that the server was not vulnerable at all. Oh well. Maybe next time it will be ;)
In my previous post I described how to use SoapUI through Stunnel to test HTTPS web services. So following up on that, I was using SoapUI to test XXE attacks as well. So I followed stuff given above on the link to try and read the passwd file from the remote machine (which I'd confirmed was a Ubuntu box). To my pleasant surprise it immediately worked and the entire /etc/passwd file got displayed in the Soap response. Yay. Victory jig. And all that ;)
I was brought down to earth though when I saw an account called 'arvind' in the response. For some stupid reason, SoapUI was retrieving my own passwd file and displaying it in the response. Huh?
So I set Burp up again and set Intercept to on to see what was happening. To my surprise, the request itself already had my passwd file..and the response was just reflecting it back. So even before hitting my own client proxy SoapUI had done 'something' with my request, expanded my own entities and THEN sent it to Burp. It wasn't ever reaching the server directly. Meaning..if I used SoapUI there wasn't any way to directly test XXE...unless there was some tweak somewhere where I could turn off request parsing.
Anyway since I had Burp as well in my proxy chain before it hit the server, it didn't really matter and I could test it in Burp. Turned out that the server was not vulnerable at all. Oh well. Maybe next time it will be ;)
0 comments:
Post a Comment