Appropriately controlling admittance to web content is significant for running a safe web worker. Index crossing or Path Traversal is a HTTP assault which permits aggressors to get to limited catalogs and execute orders outside of the web worker’s root registry.
Web workers give two primary degrees of security instruments
An Access Control List is utilized in the approval cycle. It is a rundown which the web worker’s manager uses to show which clients or gatherings can get to, change or execute specific records on the worker, just as other access rights.
The root registry is a particular index on the worker record framework in which the clients are kept. Clients can’t get to anything over this root.
For instance: the default root registry of IIS on Windows is C:\Inetpub\wwwroot and with this arrangement, a client doesn’t approach C:\Windows yet approaches C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\news and some other indexes and documents under the root catalog (given that the client is confirmed by means of the ACLs).
The root index keeps clients from getting to any documents on the worker, for example, C:\WINDOWS/system32/win.ini on Windows stages and the/and so on/passwd record on Linux/UNIX stages.
This weakness can exist either in the web worker programming itself or in the web application code.
To play out a registry crossing assault, all an assailant requires is an internet browser and some information on where to aimlessly discover any default documents and registries on the framework.
What an assailant can do if your site is defenseless
With a framework defenseless against index crossing, an aggressor can utilize this weakness to venture out of the root catalog and access different pieces of the record framework. This may enable the assailant to see confined documents, which could give the aggressor more data needed to additional trade off the framework.
Contingent upon how the site access is set up, the aggressor will execute orders by mimicking himself as the client which is related with “the site”. Along these lines everything relies upon what the site client has been offered admittance to in the framework.
Illustration of a Directory Traversal assault by means of web application code
In web applications with dynamic pages, input is generally gotten from programs through GET or POST solicitation techniques. Here is an illustration of a HTTP GET demand URL
GET http://test.webarticles.com/show.asp?view=oldarchive.html HTTP/1.1
Host: test.webarticles.com
With this URL, the browser requests the dynamic page show.asp from the server and with it also sends the parameter view with the value of oldarchive.html. When this request is executed on the web server, show.asp retrieves the file oldarchive.html from the server’s file system, renders it and then sends it back to the browser which displays it to the user. The attacker would assume that show.asp can retrieve files from the file system and sends the following custom URL.
GET http://test.webarticles.com/show.asp?view=../../../../../Windows/system.ini HTTP/1.1
Host: test.webarticles.com
This will cause the dynamic page to retrieve the file system.ini from the file system and display it to the user. The expression ../ instructs the system to go one directory up which is commonly used as an operating system directive. The attacker has to guess how many directories he has to go up to find the Windows folder on the system, but this is easily done by trial and error.
Example of a Directory Traversal attack via web server
Apart from vulnerabilities in the code, even the web server itself can be open to directory traversal attacks. The problem can either be incorporated into the web server software or inside some sample script files left available on the server.
The vulnerability has been fixed in the latest versions of web server software, but there are web servers online which are still using older versions of IIS and Apache which might be open to directory traversal attacks. Even though you might be using a web server software version that has fixed this vulnerability, you might still have some sensitive default script directories exposed which are well known to hackers.
For example, a URL request which makes use of the scripts directory of IIS to traverse directories and execute a command can be
GET http://server.com/scripts/..%5c../Windows/System32/cmd.exe?/c+dir+c:\ HTTP/1.1
Host: server.com
The request would return to the user a list of all files in the C:\ directory by executing the cmd.exe command shell file and run the command dir c:\ in the shell. The %5c expression that is in the URL request is a web server escape code which is used to represent normal characters. In this case %5c represents the character \.
Newer versions of modern web server software check for these escape codes and do not let them through. Some older versions however, do not filter out these codes in the root directory enforcer and will let the attackers execute such commands.
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