WebGoat Admin lost password Challenge

InfoSec Write-ups – Medium–

WebGoat first challenge

This is the first of four CTF-like challenges present in WebGoat

The challenge itself is not particularly complex but the process you have to go through is what’s important here

I have spent many hours trying to figure anything plausible on this challenge, thehackerish’s video that you can find below has been my last resort just to be sure I was somewhat on the right track, since I have been trying to think about solutions in the realm of what I know is somewhat usual in security related CTFs, alas I was mistaken, but this helped me understand a lot about the mental process of figuring out possible solutions

To fully appreciate what it means to go through this particular challenge and every single possible aspect looking for vulnerabilities, I highly recommend watching this video from thehackerish after you tried the challenge by yourself

https://medium.com/media/de7608da620618d5585b705a3d80d986/href

I have to stress that this is a CTF challenge and it is not a usual real-life security vulnerability issue or a plausible security aimed CTF so stop reading if you do not want any spoilers and go solve it by yourself first

Let’s proceed, once the challenge page is loaded, go check Burp to see what happens during the process

Burp history filters

Enable logging for every possible MIME type

Burp history requests

Burp History will reveal the full extent of the loading process, of all these things, the ones highlighted in red arrows are loaded specifically for this challenge, the other seems to be shared between all of WebGoat (but this does not really mean anything though)
In particular:

  • /WebGoat/Challenge1.lesson.lesson is the challenge page, a lot of HTML but not much interesting info
  • /WebGoat/service/lessoninfo.mvc is invoked by the lesson page to get the contents, not much in there
  • /WebGoat/challenge/logo is an extentionless PNG image file loaded for the challenge, while boss.jpg has been loaded in other WebGoat pages and it is not in a “challenge” directory
Challenge page HTML on browser dev tool

By checking the page HTML source, we can find the /WebGoat/challenge/logo in the lesson div

logo PNG without extension

The infamous logo image without file extention

I went over the Debugger dev tool and searched all page loaded files for admin/pass/password/login/username just to be sure but it did not show anything interesting

Then I started to look for admin/pass/password/login/username in the responses on Burp History, Burp is exceptional for this, just put your text on the search bar and click through the responses

Burp search feature at its best

And just like that, here we have username and password for this challenge

Login to the challenge page, you will be given the flag

This concludes WebGoat Admin lost password Challenge

I hope you liked it.

PVXs — https://twitter.com/pivixih


WebGoat Admin lost password Challenge was originally published in InfoSec Write-ups on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

View original article on InfoSec Write-ups – Medium

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