Beginner Guide to OS Command Injection

The dynamic Web applications may make the most of scripts to call up some functionality in the command line on the web server to process the input that received from the client and unsafe user input may led to OS command injection.  OS Command injection is refer as shell injection attack arise when an attacker try to perform system level commands through a vulnerable application in order to retrieve information of  web server or try to make unauthorized access into server .

Impact Analysis

Impact: Critical

Ease of Exploitability: Medium

Risk Rating: High

In this attack the attacker will inject his unwanted system level command so that he can fetch the information of web server; for example: ls , whoami , uname -a and etc.

Let’s consider a scenario where web application allows user to PING an IP other user so that it get confirms that the host connection 

Verify parameters to inject data

 The following parameters should be tested for command injection flaws, as the application may be using one of these parameters to build a command back at the web server:

• GET: In this method input parameters are sent in URLs.
• POST: In this method, input parameters are sent in HTTP body.
• HTTP header: Applications frequently use header fields to discover end users and display requested information to the user based on the value in the headers.

Some of the important header fields to check for command injection are:

• Cookies
• X-Forwarded-For
• User-agent
• Referrer

METACHARACTER

Using vulnerability scanner attacker come to know that current web application is vulnerable to command injection and try injecting system level unwanted command using Meta character.

Metacharacter are symbolic operators which are use to separate actual command from unwanted command. The ampercent (&) was used as a separator that would divide the authentic input and the command that you are trying to inject.

It will more clear in following image where attacker will inject his payload dir using metacharacter that retrieve present directory of web server.  

As result it will dump following output as shown in given image where it has validated wrong user input.

OS Command Injection Operators

 The developer possibly will set filters to obstruct the some metacharacter. This would block our injected data, and thus we need to try out with other metacharacters too, as shown in the following table:

Steps to exploit – OS Command Injection

Step 1: Identify the input field

Step 2: Understand the functionality

Step 3: Try the Ping method time delay

Step 4: Use various operators to exploit OS command Injection

Type of Command Injection

 Error based injection: When attacker injects a command through an input parameter and the output of that command is displayed on the certain web page, it proof that the application is vulnerable to the command injection. The displayed result might be in the form of an error or the actual outcomes of the command that you tried to run. An attacker then modifies and adds additional commands depending on the shell the web server and assembles information from the application.

Blind based Injection: The results of the commands that you inject will not displayed to the attacker and no error messages are returned it similar as blind SQL injection. The attacker will use another technique to identify whether the command was really executed on the server.

Mitigation-OS Command Injection

• Strong server side validation
• Implement a white list
• OS Hardening
• Use build in API’s for interacting with the OS if needed. More secure!!
• Avoid applications from calling out directly the OS system commands

Author: AArti Singh is a Researcher and Technical Writer at Hacking Articles an Information Security Consultant Social Media Lover and Gadgets. Contact here

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