Skip to main content

When the locked account bypassed

Generally the accounts are locked when the attempt to login exceed a certain no. of unsuccessful attempts. The userids are locked by the application to thwart any further attempt to brute force. Generally the threshold is 3 unsuccessful attempts.
But I recently came across an application where there was a flaw which leads to bypass the account lockout.
Suppose an account is already locked and we try to provide the correct userid and password as now we remember the correct combination.

It acts like the below:
1. In one tab we'll access the login page and enter the userid/ password correctly. But the app will not let you in because the userid is locked and displays account locked message.

2. Now try accessing an internal url of the application in the second tab in the same browser since two tabs share the session id in most of the browsers.

3. The application lets you in the second tab!

This behavior of the application puzzled us until we inspected it closely and came to know about the below reason which could cause this.

1. In the first tab, when first time we try to login into a already locked user, using correct credentials, the application validates it and once it finds it correct, it sets the session ID before checking if the userid is locked or not.

2. When in the 2nd tab we try to access any internal url, now the application finds that this is a valid session and logs you in.

3. So the issue was the order in which the application was checking the session vs the locked account flag.



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Ardilla- New tool for finding SQL Injection and XSS

Three Researchers -- MIT's Adam Kiezun , Stanford's Philip Guo , and Syracuse University's Karthick Jayaraman -- has developed a new tool ' Ardilla ' that automatically finds and exploits SQL injection and cross-site scripting vulnerabilities in Web applications. It creates inputs that pinpoint bugs in Web applications and then generates SQL injection and XSS attacks. But for now Ardilla is for PHP -based Web app only. The researchers say Ardilla found 68 never-before found vulnerabilities in five different PHP applications using the tool -- 23 SQL injection and 45 XSS flaws. More information is awaited. For their attack generation techniques refer to their document at: http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/mernst/pubs/create-attacks-tr054.pdf

File Upload through Null Byte Injection

Sometimes, during file upload we come across situation wherein there would be check on the file extension at the client side as well as server side too. If the application does allow only .jpeg extension to be uploaded, the client side java script checks for the extension of the file before passing the request. We all know that how easily this can be defeated. Some applications, checks for the extension at the server side also. That's not easy to bypass. However there are some ways with which it still can be bypassed. Most of server side scripts are written in high level languages such as Php, Java etc who still use some C/C++ libraries to read the file name and contents. That leads to the problem. In C/C++ a line ends with /00 or which is called Null Byte. So whenever the interpreter sees a null byte at the end of the a string, it stops reading thinking it has reached at the end of the string. This can be used for the bypass. It works for many servers, specially php servers. T

Combining power of Fiddler with Burp

Both are pretty powerful tools when it comes to intercept and modify http communications. But at some point of time, they become even more powerful combo if tied with each other. They complement each other. In a recent pentest I came across a similar situation where in Burp was not able to intercept a specific kind of traffic and Fiddler came to rescue. The application was designed to upload video. The initial communication was straight forward, I mean logging into application, filling up the video details etc. And all these were easily captured by Burp except the point where you hit the Upload Video and it connects to a different server and surprisingly it was not captured by Burp, not sure why, even after repeated attempts. So, I fired Fiddler to see if the it sees this request. But it's a;ways to play with requests using Burp due to it's various functionalities like, Intruder, Repeaters etc. But it was necessary to capture this request in Burp. So the below steps can be