Samba 2.0.7 SWAT vulnerabilities (fwd)

miah miah at uberhax0r.net
Tue Oct 31 18:22:03 GMT 2000


You guys really need a "security at samba.org" contact.

-miah

******************************************************************************
the original writeup can be found at http://www.uberhax0r.net/~miah/swat
along with all the code mentioned in this advisory
******************************************************************************

The program swat included in the samba distribution allows username and
password bruteforcing. An attacker can easily generate userlists and then
bruteforce their passwords. Comments in the source code show that somebody
tried to prevent this from happening[1].

The problem occurs when a user types in the wrong password. If swat gets a
valid username, but incorrect password it errors with:

2second pause

401 Authorization Required

You must be authenticated to use this service.

If swat gets a invalid username / password:

NO PAUSE

401 Bad Authorization

username/password must be supplied

The following code is written by t12. It will generate a list of valid
usernames and then brute force passwords for those usernames. It has been
tested on freebsd.

http://www.uberhax0r.net/~miah/swat/code/flyswatter.c

Obviously, if the username/password are correct you get logged in.

What makes this even worse is that swat does no logging. However; if
logging[2] is enabled a temp race exists. Swat does not check for file
existence before hand and it overwrites the file without regret. What
makes this even worse is swat will log *any* input it gets into this log
file. So for example we have local shell on a system running swat but want
root we simply:

ln -s /tmp/cgi.log /etc/passwd

telnet localhost 901
--enter the following--
rootuser::0:0::/:/bin/bash
--hang up the connection--

We now have the following entry in our /etc/passwd file:
[Date: Mon, 23 Oct 2000 16:03:13 GMT localhost.localdomain (127.0.0.1)]
rootuser::0:0::/:/bin/bash

You could also use this shell script
http://www.uberhax0r.net/~miah/swat/code/swat-exp.sh
or if you want it in C
http://www.uberhax0r.net/~miah/swat/code/swat-exp.c
also precompiled for linux
http://www.uberhax0r.net/~miah/swat/code/swat-exp.linux (code by optyx)

You can also download a fixed cgi.c
http://www.uberhax0r.net/~miah/swat/code/cgi.c.fixed (make your own damned
diff) (fix by optyx)

You can now su to that user. *NOTE* this will destroy the passwd file. Now
you might be thinking "but if the /tmp/cgi.log exists, how can a user
overwrite it with a symlink?". The answer: Why bother! The cgi.log file
contains everything the users webbrowser sent back to it including their
login/password.

The Authorization: Basic entries have username:password encoded in base64
in them. Most of the time the swat administrator will login as root to do
the changes to the smb.conf, so getting root is easy. You can run the
gimme-login.sh script to get a list of logins from the cgi.log.

Swat is also vulnerable to a DoS attack. Anybody can perform this. Simply
login to swat with a improper username and password, but change the
default url from "hostname:901" to somthing like
"hostname:901?somerandomfile". Swat will error with "Authentication
Required"(even with valid accounts) and inetd will restart it. Using
netscape, netscape will retry to get the file and will eventually cause
the inetd daemon to shutdown swat for 10 minutes (dependent on
inetd configuration, this is tested on linux redhat 6.2)

[1] In the cgi.c file the following entry exists:
Line 349/367
/*
* Always give the same error so a cracker
* cannot tell why we fail.
*/

The person that wrote this code obviously didn't check their work to well.

[2] Logging is enabled by changing samba-2.0.7/source/web/cgi.c's "#define
CGI_LOGGING 0" to "#define CGI_LOGGING 1". Some systems may have this
by default, otherwise its a tweak the sysadmin will most likely have to
do.

credit to miah for discovering everything and t12 and optyx for the
code.

*****************************************************************************
Uberhax0r Communications, putting bullets in mullets since '96





More information about the samba-technical mailing list