Suidy Walkthrough – HackMyVM – Writeup

Suidy by SML is an easy machine from the HackMyVM platform. The machine works on VirtualBox. As the name suggests, the machine has a vulnerability about a SUID binary. “Suidy Walkthrough – HackMyVM – Writeup”.

Link to the machine: https://hackmyvm.eu/machines/machine.php?vm=suidy

Identify the target

Firstly, we have to identify the IP address of the target.

sudo netdiscover -r 10.0.0.0/24

Scan open ports

Next, we have to scan the open ports on the target.

nmap -v -T4 -p- -sC -sV -oN nmap.log 10.0.0.30 

Here, we just have port 80 to enumerate further.

Enumerate the webserver

The default page displayed “hi” only. However, on the robots.txt file, there is a link at the very end.

There is a path /shehatesme that has the following text.

She hates me because I FOUND THE REAL SECRET! I put in this directory a lot of .txt files. ONE of .txt files contains credentials like "theuser/thepass" to access to her system! All that you need is an small dict from Seclist! 

Although this text has a username and password, let’s try to identify the .txt files.

ffuf -c -ic -r -u http://10.0.0.30/shehatesme/FUZZ.txt -w /usr/share/seclists/Discovery/Web-Content/directory-list-2.3-small.txt -od results

The above command stores the matched results inside a directory called results. Let’s check one of the files from the results.

Here, we can see that the response body has the username/password pair. So, we can use the tail command to combine all of the files to a new dictionary.

tail -q -n 1 * | sort | uniq | tee dict.txt

Furthermore, we can replace the forward slash with a colon.

sed -i "s/\//:/g" dict.txt

Now, we can bruteforce the SSH server with this wordlist as follows.

hydra -C dict.txt 10.0.0.30 ssh

Finally, I logged in as the user theuser.

Root privilege escalation

There is another user suidy on the target.

Inside the directory of suidy, there is a SUID binary ‘suidyyyyy’ that gives us the shell of the user suidy. After we get the access, we can read the note.txt file. It said on the file that “root knows it and runs as a script”. This means that the root might execute some script. Hence, I downloaded the binary “pspy64” to snoop on the processes.

So, from the note and the cron job, we can guess that the root user periodically ensures the SUID permission on the binary “suidyyyy”. Furthermore, we can replace the binary with our own source code.

However, we have to write and compile the source code as the user theuser.

Next, I compiled the code.

gcc suidyyyyy.c -o suidyyyyy
cp suidyyyyy /home/suidy/suidyyyyy

After some time, this binary is set SUID permissions.

Hence, I executed the binary to get the root shell.

Check my walkthrough of BassamCTF from Vulnhub