Month: March 2017

Cross Site Scripting (XSS)

Penetrating PornHub – XSS vulns galore (plus a cool shirt!)

Posted on by Jon Bottarini

When PornHub launched their public bug bounty program, I was pretty sure that most of the low hanging fruits of vulnerabilities would be taken care of and already reported. When I first started poking around, I found my first vulnerability in less than 15 minutes. The second vulnerability was found a few minutes afterward. I have never in my entire bug hunting career found bugs this quickly, so it was pretty exciting.

In return, I received two payments of $250 and a really really cool T-Shirt + stickers that I posted on Reddit here:

When I posted this on Reddit I had no idea it would be so popular and raise so many questions. Most people asked “What was the hack?” followed by “Why would you hack PornHub?” and I couldn’t talk about it until…now. (These vulnerabilities have now been fixed.)

I found and reported two reflected cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities within 20 minutes of browsing the PornHub Premium website. Cross site scripting, if you don’t know what that is, is a type of vulnerability that enables an attacker to run dangerous scripts on a website. OWASP sums it up pretty nicely here:

An attacker can use XSS to send a malicious script to an unsuspecting user. The end user’s browser has no way to know that the script should not be trusted, and will execute the script. Because it thinks the script came from a trusted source, the malicious script can access any cookies, session tokens, or other sensitive information retained by the browser and used with that site. These scripts can even rewrite the content of the HTML page.

The first one was found using the “redeem code” section of the site – it didn’t check to see if the code being entered in the text input for the redeem code was an actual payload, so I was able to use the following payload to reflect the script on the page:

The first part of the payload “PAYLOAD STACK” ensures that the rest of the payload is sent through. If I entered:

Without the words in front of it, the application would reject it and nothing would appear on the page. Entering something non-malicious to begin would trick the validator, and in turn, allow the payload to execute.

The second vulnerability was also a XSS. This was was a bit simpler, and was found by entering a payload in a URL parameter that only appears once to new users… which is why I think it wasn’t found until now – most bug hunters like to get a feel of a website before they start poking around and trying to get things to break, but usually I take the different approach and use incognito windows so that the website thinks it’s the first time I’ve ever visited the site before. This is where the vulnerability existed.

I noticed that the PornHub Premium site was mostly off-limits unless you paid to access it. Before you could even pay, there is a “pop-up” window that displays to the user that they are going to be viewing pornography and to either enter or exit by clicking on a button. What I also noticed is that once you selected “enter”, there was a part of the URL that changed and added a parameter. This vulnerable parameter was &compliancePop=no_gateway  – this is where I was able to enter:

And I got a really nice “1” to appear on the screen, which shows evidence of cross-site scripting. I reported both of these vulnerabilities to PornHub and they were triaged within 24 hours.

I’d like to thank the folks at PornHub for running such a fair, quick responding program and keeping their users safe. Also – thanks for the amazing T-Shirt! Thanks also to the folks at Reddit for being so interested in this that I had to send over 200 pm’s to people who wanted to know what I did…hopefully this lives up to the promise that I would tell you about it, and sorry it took so long.

I have other bugs and vulnerabilities that are cooler and more intense than this one coming soon, so check back later and I’ll share them with you. Additionally, you can follow me on Twitter to stay up to date with my bugs and what I’m doing, if you wish.

Cross Site Scripting (XSS)

Discovering a stored XSS that affects over 900k websites (CVE-2016-9751)

Posted on by Jon Bottarini

In my free time when I’m not hunting for bugs in paid programs, I like to contribute a bit to the open-source community and check for vulnerabilities that might arise. In doing so, I found a stored cross-site scripting vulnerability that affected over 900,000 websites… yikes.

The vulnerable application is called Piwigo  – an open source image showcase/album that, according to Google, is active on over 900,000 webpages. The true number is probably higher than that, but that’s just what the original search brings up. It’s commonly a one-click install on many web host platform for image showcases. Anyhow – on to the bug:

Piwigo has an option that allows for a “quick search” of the photo gallery. (Important to note: There are different “themes” that a visitor can choose that changes the way the pictures are displayed and the way the page looks, this will be important to remember later.)

When you enter a payload, the page displays the payload (sanitized properly) – and then saves the search as a number inside the URL. For example, my search URL is:

http://piwigo.org/demo/index.php?/search/38692

That number at the end can be changed, so you can see what other keywords people have searched on the site. I’m not sure if this is a good or a bad idea, but that’s not the bug.

The bug is that when you enter a payload in this quick search area and have also selected the elegant theme there is the option to open a “search criteria” page.

It just so happens that on this search rules page… the keywords (or payload) you entered earlier are not sanitized. You end up getting this beautiful pop-up that all of us bug-hunters love to see:

Sidenote: If you’re a bug bounty hunter, it’s always best to use alert(document.domain) instead of alert(1) – it tells you if the payload is actually firing on a domain that is in scope for the program.

Now here is where it gets bad… that URL above is permanently stored on your website – and I think the only way to remove it is if you manually purge the search history from the administrator backend. Below is a picture of where you can perform that purge:

Why is this bad? Well, before I reported this bug, I’d be concerned if an attacker kept a variety of payloads that will still execute even after the website has implemented a patch – since the search is stored in the database before the patch went into place, it makes sense that all the attacker needs to do is direct the victim to the old URL – and the website owner can’t do much if they haven’t purged the search history.

Example of what I mean: At the time of this writing, if you visit the above URL in that picture on piwigo.org, the payload will still execute, even though the vulnerability was fixed a long time ago.

I was assigned (my first ever!) CVE-2016-9751 regarding this vulnerability. A fix (https://github.com/Piwigo/Piwigo/issues/559) was implemented after reporting. Webmasters and gallery owners should update to Piwigo 2.9 in order to implement the patch.

Payload used:

 

Other Bugs

Bypassing Apple’s iOS 10 Restrictions Settings – Twice

Posted on by Jon Bottarini

By default, Apple has a feature that allows all of their iOS devices to be assigned restrictions, so that employees and mostly children cannot access naughty websites and other types of less-desirable content. You can enable these settings by visiting Settings > General > Restrictions on your iPhone or iPad.

Around the beginning of every year I try to break Apple’s restrictions settings for websites. It’s a pretty nerdy thing to do and its not really classified as a “vulnerability” – but it’s a fun challenge and leads to some pretty interesting bugs, so I wanted to talk about a few of them here:

When I test the restriction settings, I turn restrictions on, and then I change the website settings to allow Safari, but only the default specific websites (see screenshot below).

The first time I found out how to bypass the restrictions, I did it on accident. I noticed that there were certain pages I had open previously in Safari that, when restrictions were turned on, I was still able to reload even though the domains were not on the list of approved websites. I realized that all these pages I had open had one thing in common: they were all displaying PDF’s. So now, by simply appending .pdf at the end of the Safari URL, it was possible to visit any website. An example is below:

Restricted URL: www.jonbottarini.com (left image)

Allowed URL: www.jonbottarini.com/anything.pdf (right image)

That one was pretty interesting. I reported it to Apple through their bug tracker and it was marked as a duplicate  – looks like someone else had found it before me. I tried again to see if it was possible through another method, and after a few hours I discovered another way:

(The following is my assumptions as to how the website restrictions work behind the scenes) When Apple checks a URL, they check the structure of the URL to see if it matches the list of whitelisted domains. What doesn’t happen is an additional check to ensure that the URL actually ends… or if it contains subdomains that match a whitelisted domain. This may be hard to explain so I made a photo to demonstrate:

See what’s happening here? Only the URL up to “.com” is checked against the whitelist. The restrictions settings do not check to see if a URL contains subdomains… so I’m able to trick the filter to allowing a domain such as “www.apple.com123.com” to be let through. The actual domain name in this case is com123.com – which is definitely not on my approved list of domains.

Restricted URL: www.com123.com (left image)

Allowed URL (but shouldn’t be!): www.apple.com.com123.com (right image)

I also reported this to Apple about 7 months ago and it still isn’t fixed. I asked them for permission to share this article.

This is just an interesting bug that slipped through the cracks, I assume they will have a fix out eventually for the bugs. Still haven’t made it in the Security HoF for Apple yet, but it’s definitely a goal of mine for the year.

I have other bugs and vulnerabilities that are cooler and more intense than this one coming soon, so check back later and I’ll share them with you. Additionally, you can follow me on Twitter to stay up to date with my bugs and what I’m doing, if you wish.