Tag: IT Security

Lord of the SID: How to Add the objectSID Attribute to a Certificate Manually

In May 2022 Microsoft has fixed a vulnerability related to certificate logon to Active Directory. As a non-privileged user you could escalate privileges by impersonating a Domain Controller, as you can join machines to the domain and thus control the dnsHostName attribute. Microsoft fixed this in an indirect way: Since last May, Windows Certification Authority…
Rogue Certificate Challenge: No Hardware Tokens, No Linux, Just a Web Server with Certificate Mapping.

I am back to my favorite security research: How to abuse certificates in a Windows / Active Directory environment! If an Active Directory integrated certification authority sign a certificate with a custom Subject Alternative Name of your choosing, you can impersonate any administrator in an AD forest. I’ve published two blog posts about how to…
Looking Back: Hacking and Defending Windows Public Key Infrastructure (ADCS)

I live at the fringes of the cybersecurity community. I have never attended infosec conferences. There will be a talk on PKI hacking at Blackhat 2021 soon: Top AD offensive security gurus are presenting comprehensive research on abusing ADCS (Active Directory Certificate Services). I only know about that, because I noticed backlinks from their article…
Injecting an EFS Recovery Agent – and Let the Virus Scanner Help You!

How can you read files encrypted with Windows’s Encrypting File System if you neither have access to the owner’s encryption certificate and key and nor that of a legit data recovery agent (DRA) … but if you are a local administrator? This work is still inspired by the hackthebox machine Helpline. You were able to…
Parse Certificates Stored in the Windows Registry

You can parse the binary blobs that represent certificates stored in the Windows registry with certutil correctly, even when the Windows Explorer / GUI tells you that this is not a certificate. certutil seems to be able to handle / ignore meta data better. Once upon a time I played with the machine Ethereal provided by…
The RSA Algorithm

You want this: Encrypt a message to somebody else – using information that is publicly available. Somebody else should then be able to decrypt the message, using only information they have; nobody else should be able to read this information. The public key cryptography algorithm RSA does achieve this. This article is my way of…
Impersonating a Windows Enterprise Admin with a Certificate: Kerberos PKINIT from Linux

This is about a serious misconfiguration of a Windows Public Key Infrastructure integrated with Active Directory: If you can edit certificate templates, you can impersonate the Active Directory Forests’s Enterprise Administrator by logging on with a client certificate. You have a persistent credential that will also survive the reset of this admin’s password. In the…
Locating Domain Controllers and Spoofing Active Directory DNS Servers

Last year, hackthebox let me test something I have always found fascinating – and scary: You can impersonate any user in a Windows Active Directory Forest if you have control over the certificate templates of an AD-integrated Windows Public Key Infrastructure: Add extended key usages for smartcard logon to the template, enroll for the certificate,…
Helpline @ hackthebox: Injecting an EFS Recovery Agent to Read Encrypted Files

Another great machine has been retired on hackthebox.eu – Helpline by @egre55! Here is my ‘silly’ unintended way to root the box: You can get both the encrypted user and root flag via the cumbersome web RCE alone – if you wait for a legit user to just look at the file. This is unlikely…
Sizzle @ hackthebox – Unintended: Getting a Logon Smartcard for the Domain Admin!

My writeup – how to pwn my favorite box on hackthebox.eu, using a (supposedly) unintended path. Sizzle – created by @mrb3n813 and @lkys37en – was the first box on HTB that had my favorite Windows Server Role – the Windows Public Key Infrastructure / Certification Authority. This CA allows a low-privileged user – amanda –…
Echo Unreadable Hex Characters in Windows: forfiles

How to transfer small files to a locked-down Windows machine? When there is no option to copy, ftp, or http GET a file. When powershell is blocked so that you can only use Windows cmd commands? My first choice would be to use certutil: certutil is a built-in tool for certificate and PKI management. It…
Ethereal @ hackthebox: Certificate-Related Rabbit Holes

This post is related to the ‘insanely’ difficult hackthebox machine Ethereal (created by egre55 and MinatoTW) that was recently retired. Beware – It is not at all a full comprehensive write-up! I zoom in on openssl, X.509 certificates, signing stuff, and related unnecessary rabbit holes that were particularly interesting to me – as somebody who…
Certificates and PKI. The Prequel.

Some public key infrastructures run quietly in the background since years. They are half forgotten until the life of a signed file has come to an end – but then everything is on fire. In contrast to other seemingly important deadlines (Management needs this until XY or the world will come to an end!) this…
$Unintended 2nd Order SQL Injection$

Unintended 2nd Order SQL Injection

Why I am not afraid of the AI / Big Data / Cloud powered robot apocalypse. SQL order injection means to run custom SQL queries through web interfaces because the input to the intended query is not sanitized, like appending the infamous ‘ OR ‘1’=’1 to a user name or search term. It is 2nd…
Cyber Something

You know you have become a dinosaur when you keep using outdated terminology. Everybody else uses the new buzz word, but you just find it odd. But someday it will creep also into your active vocabulary. Then I will use the tag cyber something, like stating that I work with cyber-physical systems. But am I…
Hacking

I am joining the ranks of self-proclaimed productivity experts: Do you feel distracted by social media? Do you feel that too much scrolling feeds transforms your mind – in a bad way? Solution: Go find an online platform that will put your mind in a different state. Go hacking on hackthebox.eu. I have been hacking…
Infinite Loop: Theory and Practice Revisited.

I’ve unlocked a new achievement as a blogger, or a new milestone as a life-form. As a dinosaur telling the same old stories over and over again. I started drafting a blog post, as I always do since a while: I do it in my mind only, twist and turn in for days or weeks…
Where Are the Files? [Winsol – UVR16x2]

Recently somebody has asked me where the log files are stored. This question is more interesting then it seems. We are using the freely programmable controller UVR16x2 (and its predecessor) UVR1611) … .. and their Control and Monitoring Interface – CMI: The CMI is a data logger and runs a web server. It logs data…