Let's Explore Wonderland: The Try Hack Me CTF. 🐰

I've never really been a big Alice in Wonderland fan. I don't hate it, but it's not my favorite piece of literature. That aside, I really enjoyed this CTF (except the last part, but we'll get to that later). Get ready to fall into some holes, because we are about to hack Wonderland. 🐰

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Obtain the flag in user.txt

Okay, first things first. When we start our machine and we navigate to the given IP in our browser, we are given the following objective: "Follow the White Rabbit". Inspecting the page source, we can see that there are no hidden values for us to see, so we need to move on to our enumeration.

Start up your terminal and run a good ol' nmap scan. We can see two services that are running: ssh and http.
nmap -sV -sC -Pn <your machine IP>

Next, run a gobuster scan so we can see if there are any directories which are hidden. There are a few - but the most important one is the /r directory.
gobuster dir -w /usr/share/wordlists/dirbuster/directory-list-2.3-small.txt -u <your machine IP> -t 50

When we go to the /r directory in our browser, it tells us to keep going. Let's run another gobuster scan.
gobuster dir -w /usr/share/wordlists/dirbuster/directory-list-2.3-small.txt -u <your machine IP>/r -t 50

Note that you can skip doing the manual enumeration for each directory by running a normal gobuster scan with a -R flag at the end. We can see that there is a /r/a directory. You can probably guess where this is going (the next one will be /b/b/i/t).

Let's follow the white rabbit to the end by going to the /r/a/b/b/i/t directory! When we inspect the page source, we can see that we have found Alice's username and password for a potential ssh login.

Okay! Now, let's open up our terminal and log into our ssh service using our found credentials.
ssh alice@<your machine IP>

When we list the files in our current directory, we find that we have a root.txt and a walrus_and_the_carpenter.py file. We will use come back to these files later.

For now, let's find and read the contents of our user.txt file, which is located under root (hence the hint, everything is upside down in here!).
cat /root/user.txt

Hoorah! We've found our user.txt flag!

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Escalate your privileges, what is the flag in root.txt?

Okay, remember when I said we'd get back to our root.txt and a walrus_and_the_carpenter.py files? Well, cd back into the /home/alice directory and let's analyse these files again. We do not have permission to read the contents of the root.txt file, and the walrus_and_the_carpenter.py imports the random module in python which returns a random poem.

//contents of walrus_and_the_carpenter.py (I forgot to take a screenshot)

import random
poem = """The sun was shining on the sea,
Shining with all his might:
He did his very best to make
............................
............................
And that was scarcely odd, because
Theyd eaten every one."""

for i in range(10):
    line = random.choice(poem.split("\n"))
    print("The line was:\t", line)

Let's see what commands Alice can run in our current environment.
sudo -l

We can see that Alice can run the /usr/bin/python3.6 walrus_and_the_carpenter.py command (as one single string) to escalate her privilege to Rabbit. Now, we can exploit that random module that is imported above via Python Library Hijacking. We will do this by creating a random.py file in our current /home/alice directory, adding contents into it via nano and then running our command.

Carefully follow the steps below:

1. Make sure you are in the /home/alice directory, then create a new file via the touch random.py command.
   

2. Then, open up nano so that we can insert our script in this file via nano random.py.
   

3. With nano opened, insert the following script and save:
   

import os

os.system("/bin/bash")

1. Finally, we can commence with our privilege escalation from user Alice to User Rabbit via the following command: sudo -u rabbit /usr/bin/python3.6 /home/alice/walrus_and_the_carpenter.py

We now have access to the system as Rabbit. Let's see what we can find in the /home/rabbit directory. There is a single executable: ./teaParty.

When we run this executable, we can see that there is an odd string "Probably by Sat, 11 Jun 2022 13:16:45 +0000".

If we read this file with nano, we can see that it is calling upon a date file.

Before we continue, lets see what access we have to this teaParty executable by running: ls -la.

Fortunately, we can escalate our privilege from Rabbit to root by spawning root privilege via the Echo Command hack (we will do this by modifying our date file in our /tmp direcotory).

Carefully enter the commands as sequenced below:

1. cd /tmp
2. echo "/bin/bash" > date
3. chmod 777 date
4. echo $PATH
5. export PATH=/tmp:$PATH
6. cd /home/rabbit
7. ./teaParty

We now have access as Hatter! When we see which privileges he has, we see an interesting file: password.txt. We now have the password for Hatter!

Unfortunately, Hatter does not have any sudo capabilities (try this by running sudo -l). Now this is where my struggle started. I used GTFObins to find a list of binaries that we can exploit to escalate our environments' capabilities so that we can run sudo as Hatter. We will do so via perl.

In your terminal run the command below. I kept on getting permission denied, so I had to restart my OPENVPN connection, and then I got in! Unfortunately, I was so tired by then, that I forgot to take screenshots. I guess you can say I fell into a deep hole. 😒
perl -e 'use POSIX qw(setuid); POSIX::setuid(0); exec "/bin/sh";'

You can now cd into and read the contents of our /home/alice/root.txt directory. We got our flag!

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Conclusion

Things got pretty messy there at the end, so I apologize for that. I guess this write-up is as upside down as the lab itself. 🙃

I hope that this was easy enough for you to follow, and until next time, happy hacking! 😁

See more on my GitHub.