A brief writeup of solving the Overthewire War Game Natas, levels 11 through 20

10 ➜ 11

• Well, some characters are escaped this time, but that's not enough to stop us
• Try this '' /etc/natas_webpass/natas11 #

11 ➜ 12

• The source code will tell you what algorithm is being used
• That algorithm is susceptible to a plaintext attack
• A XOR attack works like this

plaintext ⊕ key = encrypted_text
encrypted_text ⊕ plaintext = key
encrypted_text ⊕ key = plaintext

• Find the key using the default data and the default cookie
• Now modify the data as you need

12 ➜ 13

• Notice what part isn't paid to attention to in the code
• Manipulate the HTML to use that part to your advantage and simply print out the password
• PHP will work

13 ➜ 14

• Read about the function being used to validate the input data.
• A list of file types and their initial bytes are available here
• PHP to the rescue again...

14 ➜ 15

• Straight-forward ______ injection

15 ➜ 16

• Straight-forward ______ ______ injection
• Remember, passwords consist of 32 alphanumeric characters
• Fuzzy matching strings to specific patterns can require some specific words...
• Very good write-up about blind SQL injection

16 ➜ 17

• Fuzzy matching but this time with grep
• $() to run commands is still allowed so let's take advantage of that
• Find a word that exists in the file, say xyz. It has to be an absolute word.
• Now the trick is to grep the password file for a part of the password, prepend it to the actual word and give the whole as an input.
• If the grep returns something, the searched string would become abc\ xyz, something that doesn't exist in the actual file being queried using grep.
• This one was a bit tricky, so feel free to spend a lot of time on it.

17 ➜ 18

• You can see the query if debug=true but that won't be of much use.
• PHP's mysql_result() doesn't really report any errors, just a boolean depending on if the query was executed successfully, no use since the result wasn't visible.
• After a couple of trials, triggering time delays was the answer.
• Be careful to monitor the status of the HTTP request instead of elapsed time.

18 ➜ 19

• Two words, brute force...

19 ➜ 20

• Well it isn't incremental now...
• A lot of hit and trial with CyberChef, turns out it was a hex encoded ASCII string
• Brute force again...