At first I tried to access the database with my browser by requesting finale-docker.rtfm.re:4444/mdauth.db, unfortunately that didn't work. Let's dig deeper into the source code. We want to authenticate on the Web Application, maybe we can do an SQL injection inside the following query.
{% highlight sql%}
SELECT login FROM users WHERE hash='{$hash}' and login='{$login}'
{% endhighlight %}
In order to exploit this, we need to bypass the `escapeString` function used for `$login` and `$hash`.
The `md5` function is called with the second argument set to `true`, meaning we will get a binary output instead of a hexadecimal one. We might be able to get a backslash in the binary output, but we need to know the `APP_SALT` value in order to do our offline bruteforce. The author of the challenge was kind enough to provide a way to get this secret by misusing the `cookie`.
We can do a single failed attempt in order to get a cookie containing the md5(SALT+"1"), based on the comment in the code we know the SALT is between 0000000-9999999 (7-digit APP_SALT).
I got `MD5:4322dfb1e9b20645594e9f3f6998845a` which correspond to the following `PLAIN:86203711`. We now have our APP_SALT value : 8620371. The following script will bruteforce the first 1000 numbers looking for a quote in the last char of the MD5 output.
In my first attempt, I was looking for a backslash "\" in order to escape the single quote "'" from the query and use the login to complete the SQL injection.
{% highlight sql%}
SELECT login FROM users WHERE hash='{$hash}' and login='{$login}'
SELECT login FROM users WHERE hash='GARBAGE\' and login=' OR 1=1--'
{% endhighlight %}
It would have worked in a MySQL database, unfortunately we were in front of a SQLite one. The documentation and stackoverflow provided the useful information, escaping is done by doubling the quote.
{% highlight sql%}
INSERT INTO table_name (field1, field2) VALUES (123, 'Hello there''s');
{% endhighlight %}
I adjusted the script to check for a single quote and got the number `45`.
{% highlight python%}
salt = "8620371"
for i in range(1000):
md5 = computeMD5hash(salt+str(i))
if "'" == md5[-1]:
print(salt+str(i), i, md5)
{% endhighlight %}
Now it's just a simple SQL injection, by using the following credential i was able to extract interesting data.
{% highlight sql%}
login = "union all select hash from users limit 1--"
password = "45"
The query looked like "SELECT login FROM users WHERE hash='GARBAGE'' and login=' union all select hash from users limit 1--'"
with hash='GARBAGE'' and login='
{% endhighlight %}
I got the following users : `admin` and `flaggy`. Next step was to extract the flag from the database, it was located in the flag_field of the users.
{% highlight bash%}
union all select flag_field from users limit 2,1--
Welcome back sigsegv{82e9f4a155b9b740b4ff37624429b031}!