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Checking npm packages using npm-audit

Our applications rely more and more on external packages to enable quick deployment and ease of development. While these packages help reduce the code we have to write ourselves, it still may present risk to our application.

If you are building Nodejs applications, you are probably using npm to manage your packages. For those that don’t know, npm is the node package manager. It is a direct source to quickly include functionality within your application. For example, say you want to hash your user passwords using bcrypt. To do that, you would grab a bcrypt package from npm. The following is just one of the bcrypt packages available:

https://www.npmjs.com/package/bcrypt

Each package we may use may also rely on other packages. This creates a fairly complex dependency graph of code used within your application you have no part in writing.

Tracking vulnerable components

It can be fairly difficult to identify issues related to these packages, never mind their sub packages. We all can’t run our own static analysis on each package we use, so identifying new vulnerabilities is not very easy. However, there are many tools that work to help identify known vulnerabilities in these packages.

When a vulnerability is publicly disclosed it receives an identifier (CVE). The vulnerability is tracked at https://cve.mitre.org/ and you can search these to identify what packages have known vulnerabilities. Manually searching all of your components doesn’t seem like the best approach.

Fortunately, npm actually has a module for doing just this. It is npm-audit. The package was included starting with npm 6.0. If you are using an earlier version of npm, you will not find it.

To use this module, you just need to be in your application directory (the same place you would do npm start) and just run:

npm audit.

On the surface, it is that simple. You can see the output of me running this on a small project I did below:

Npm audit

As you can see, it produces a report of any packages that may have known vulnerabilities. It also includes a few details about what that issue is.

To make this even better, some of the vulnerabilities found may actually be fixed automatically. If that is available, you can just run:

npm audit fix.

The full details of the different parameters can be found on the npm-audit page at https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/audit.

If you are doing node development or looking to automate identifying these types of issues, npm-audit may be worth a look. The more we can automate the better. Having something simple like this to quickly identify issues is invaluable. Remember, just because a component may be flagged as having a vulnerability, it doesn’t mean you are using that code or that your app is guaranteed vulnerable. Take the effort to determine the risk level for your application and organization. Of course, we should strive to be on the latest versions to avoid vulnerabilities, but we know reality diverts from what we wish for.

Have you been using npm-audit? Let me know. I am interested in your stories of success or failure to learn how others implement these things.

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Installing BeEF on ubuntu 18.04

While working on a VM for a class, I had the opportunity to install BeEF for the students. This was the first VM I have built using Ubuntu 18.04, so I expected there to be a few hiccups along the way. The good news is that the process was pretty straight forward and simple. Here are the steps to getting this up and running on Ubuntu 18.04.

I started off by creating a new virtual machine using Ubuntu 18.04. I won’t go through the steps of creating a new virtual machine image, but the takeaway here is that I am starting with a fresh Ubuntu system.

The BeEF team has put together some simple instructions for installing the application (https://github.com/beefproject/beef/wiki/Installation). This walk through follows these instructions pretty close, with one exception to clear up an error we will see along the way (or at least an error I saw).

The first thing I am going to do is install Ruby on my Ubuntu 18.04 image. To do this we want to run the following command:

sudo apt install ruby ruby-dev

The next step is to get the BeEF source files. We will get these from git. If you haven’t installed git, make sure to run the following command first:

sudo apt install git

Once git is available, we can clone the git project with the following command:

git clone https://github.com/beefproject/beef

This will download the source files for BeEF. Next, move into the beef directory:

cd beef

This is where the I started to run into an issue. The original beef instructions say to just run:

./install

However, when I did this, I received a permission error. To resolve that I ran:

sudo ./install

There is probably a way to fix this permission error without running as sudo.. but I didn’t investigate that further.

Once the installation was successfully completed, I ran:

./beef

I was quickly greeted with the following error:

demo@ubuntu:~/beef$ ./beef
Traceback (most recent call last):
4: from ./beef:44:in `<main>’
3: from /usr/lib/ruby/2.5.0/rubygems/core_ext/kernel_require.rb:59:in `require’
2: from /usr/lib/ruby/2.5.0/rubygems/core_ext/kernel_require.rb:59:in `require’
1: from /home/demo/beef/core/loader.rb:17:in `‘
/home/demo/beef/core/loader.rb:17:in `require’: cannot load such file — xmlrpc/client (LoadError)

After digging around, I found that ubuntu 18.04 by default installs Ruby 2.5, which apparently doesn’t have the xmlrpc/client embedded. To fix this, we just need to tell BeEF that it needs this gem. To fix this, I modified the Gemfile file following these steps:

rm Gemfile.lock – Do this first to remove the lock file. Click Y to remove it.

sudo nano Gemfile

In the file, add the following line:

gem ‘xmlrpc’

Save the file and re-run the installation:

sudo ./install

At this point, the installation should be successful. Try running the following command:

./beef

You should see something like the following:

demo@ubuntu:~/beef$ ./beef
[ 6:41:32][*] Browser Exploitation Framework (BeEF) 0.4.7.0-alpha
[ 6:41:32]    |   Twit: @beefproject
[ 6:41:32]    |   Site: https://beefproject.com
[ 6:41:32]    |   Blog: http://blog.beefproject.com
[ 6:41:32]    |_  Wiki: https://github.com/beefproject/beef/wiki
[ 6:41:32][*] Project Creator: Wade Alcorn (@WadeAlcorn)
[ 6:41:33][*] BeEF is loading. Wait a few seconds...
[ 6:41:38][*] 8 extensions enabled.
[ 6:41:38][*] 301 modules enabled.
[ 6:41:38][*] 2 network interfaces were detected.
[ 6:41:38][*] running on network interface: 127.0.0.1
[ 6:41:38]    |   Hook URL: http://127.0.0.1:3000/hook.js
[ 6:41:38]    |_  UI URL:   http://127.0.0.1:3000/ui/panel
[ 6:41:38][*] running on network interface: 192.168.116.139
[ 6:41:38]    |   Hook URL: http://192.168.116.139:3000/hook.js
[ 6:41:38]    |_  UI URL:   http://192.168.116.139:3000/ui/panel
[ 6:41:38][!] Warning: Default username and weak password in use!
[ 6:41:38]    |_  New password for this instance: ec04906c30d928fb857
[ 6:41:38][*] RESTful API key: 6bd0b11e772df40
[ 6:41:38][*] HTTP Proxy: http://127.0.0.1:6789
[ 6:41:38][*] BeEF server started (press control+c to stop)

Notice that there is a “New password” configured here. This is because by default beef sets the username/password to beef/beef. As this is a default, hard-coded password, it is insecure. To fix this, beef detects the default and creates a new temp password to protect the instance. It is recommended to update the username and password to your instance.

Updating the Password

To change the password stop beef by typing ctrl+c. Now, we will edit the config.yaml file:

sudo nano config.yaml

You should see something like this:


beef:
    version: '0.4.7.0-alpha'
    # More verbose messages (server-side)
    debug: false
    # More verbose messages (client-side)
    client_debug: false
    # Used for generating secure tokens
    crypto_default_value_length: 80

    # Credentials to authenticate in BeEF.
    # Used by both the RESTful API and the Admin interface
    credentials:
        user:   "beef"
        passwd: "beef"

    # Interface / IP restrictions

Modify the user and passwd fields to your own values and then save the file using ctrl+x.

When you restart BeEF and go to the ui panel you should now be able to login with your new credentials.

Notes
There should be a way to install the application without using sudo ./install. This should be checked so you don’t install using root permissions. This is a non-production image for me to use for student training.

Make sure you change the default username and password to help lock down your instance.

This tutorial is for educational purposes only. Hacking without permission is illegal and should not be done.

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Choosing Application Security Tools

There are lots of security tools available, so how do you know which one to pick?

If your security team is not including the application teams in the decision, you run a big risk of failure. The security team does get the ability to form relationships with vendors. We see them at conferences. We know people that work there. Because our focus is on security, we know the tools that exist in our space and we have an idea of which ones may be better than others. Of course, this is often due to what we hear from others, rather than our own experience with those tools.

Picking a tool in a vacuum is less than ideal. Sure, the tool may have five stars and has great detection rates. However, if the tool doesn’t fit into the development process and causes more overhead and friction, it will end up failing. A tool with 100% accuracy is still useless if it is not actually being used.

I have seen over and over where a security group acquires a tool, especially static analysis, and a few months later they realize it is just sitting on the shelf. Like all of us, we are excited when we get a new toy. We use it, learn it. Then, the newness wears off. Without the proper processes in place, this can happen with security tools as well. We don’t want this to happen to you.

The first step in determining which tools make sense is to understand the development process now and where it is going. Lets talk about static analysis for a moment. If your development process doesn’t make use of continuous integration and doesn’t plan to then that is not a high priority feature of the tool you receive. Have you considered what IDE the developers use?

I once had a situation where static analysis was about to be rolled out. The security team worked to pick a vendor and get the ball rolling. It was later in the process that the development team was brought on board with the conversation. They asked questions that were less of a priority to the security team, but more of a priority to them. For example, The tool provided a plugin for their IDE. However, when digging deeper, the plugin ran a few versions behind. So what had appeared to be a good setup, now looked a little less efficient since the plugin may not work. This isn’t a deal breaker, but depending on how you were planning on this solution working, it adds friction to the process. The more friction, the more pain.

The next step is understanding who will ultimately be using this tool? For those that listen to the podcast on a regular basis and follow my blogs, you know I am a huge fan of the application teams having direct access to these tools. In my opinion, static analysis is a developers tool. It is there to evaluate the source code and identify policy violations that only the developer can resolve. Giving them access and control over that function and embedding it into their process reduces that friction. Don’t confuse this with the idea that security is not getting the results. Security still needs to have insight into what is going on with security flaws within the application. But to be efficient, the results of these tools need to fit into the flow of how development works. Not be one-off reports under different processes.

This is no different, in my opinion, than dynamic analysis or interactive analysis. These are tools that should be used by the QA group. The group that is responsible for testing and most likely already has automated testing capabilities. They are trained in identifying bugs, reporting, and tracking them. Building these types of tools into their process just makes sense. How many listeners have their own stories of the security team exporting a thousand page report out of that dynamic scanner and sending it to the application team as a pdf? I have been there. Even I won’t read through that report.

The moral of the story here is that if we don’t understand how development works, what type of tools they already use, and what they can handle, we will probably pick a solution that will be ineffective, or at the very least, cause us a lot more work. The goal is not to just shove tools onto the development teams and say do this. As application security representatives, our goal is to help build better applications. That doesn’t mean that our job is to run all the tools and hound the application teams to fix items. By understanding the environments and processes we can pick tools that will fit much better, allowing us to focus our time on building out other solutions or processes for the organization. We are still relied upon to provide the expert advice and guidance to the issues that are identified.

If you are considering implementing these types of tools, take a moment to sit down with all involved parties to get everyone on board. A well laid out plan will go much further than a shotgun approach.

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Burp Extension – Juice Shop Routes

When it comes to testing for security within our web applications, we often look to creating simple tools to help speed things up. They also help provide a consistent way to help identify known patterns. For those that haven’t been following, I have been doing a few posts about getting the OWASP Juice Shop application up and running. In this post, I want to introduce a simple burp extension I created to help with a few of the challenges presented in the OWASP Juice Shop.

The Challenge

The OWASP Juice Shop has multiple challenges built into it to help guide the user along in finding web applications. The app is written as a single page app (SPA) and is a little different than your traditional applications. Rather than make a full page request for everything you click, instead the application just makes API calls. In short, the entire UI is returned on the first load of the application.

There are multiple challenges within the Juice Shop that require the user to access specific URLs that are not available via a menu or link. For example (and I don’t want to directly give away answers to the challenge here), imaging visiting the contact screen. If you click the menu item for contact us, it will update the URL in the address bar to be like /#/contact. So I don’t have to actually click a link to access the contact us page, I could just update that URL directly in the address bar.

Finding the Routes

So how do you find the URLs that are available to access? There are multiple ways of doing this. First, of course, you could try to just fuzz them. This is good if the URLs are not available anywhere for us to find. Fortunately, this Angular application embeds the different routes within the client-side code. It uses a RouteProvider object to do this.

With a little digging, you can find this information in the /dist/juice-shop.min.js file. This is a pretty large file and looking through it can be a little tough. Searching for RouteProvider will bring you to the route definitions.

A Burp Extension

As a professional web app tester, I spend a lot of time using Burp Suite as my web proxy. It allows me to easily view and intercept all the traffic my browser sends back and forth to the server. Another cool feature is it allows building your own extensions to solve just this type of problem. Of course, you probably wouldn’t just create an extension for this one piece or a specific app. Instead, the hope would be that it would become helpful for other applications that use angular’s route provider object. This way, when I go to test other sites, I may get this information right there in my scanner results.

I built a quick little burp extension that looks for the routeProvider object and then, if found, pulls out each route defined. The code can be found at https://github.com/jamesjardine/juiceshoproutes. The code that performs all the tasks are in the BurpExtender.java file.

Once the extension is built into a JAR file it can be added into Burp. Note that this only works for Burp Pro because it uses the passive scanner. To install it, just navigate to the “Extender” tab and click the Add button. Then select the Jar file you created:

Be 0

Here is a quick run down of what it does:

  • Looks to see if the response from the server contains the phrase $routeProvider. If it finds this phrase it then gets the start offset and the end of the object by identifying the next ] character.
  • It then loops through the specific body text looking for a match to e.when. This basically defines when the URL matches X, load a specific template.
  • Each route that is identified is then displayed in an unordered list.
  • When you visit the Target Tab and select your site, click on the Issues tab to look for Angular Routes.

This is just a quick example of how building custom burp extensions can help increase your efficiency or help provide some additional coverage for known patterns within applications.

————–POTENTIAL SPOILER INFO BELOW ——————–

IF YOU ARE WANTING TO TRY THIS OUT WITHOUT SEEING THE RESPONSE FIRST STOP READING HERE!!!

There is no interaction needed to trigger this scan except for just visiting the initial page of the Juice Shop site. The Issues tase will look like:

Be screen1

If you look at the response, you will see the following image:

Be 2

In the above image you can see the highlighted area showing where the RouteProvder routes are defined. In the following image, you can see the advisory screen which indicates the formatted list of routes that are available:

Be 3

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Installing OWASP JuiceShop with Heroku

I am often asked the question by clients and students where people can go to learn hacking techniques for application security. For years, we have had many purposely vulnerable applications available to us. These applications provide a safe environment for us to learn more about hacking applications and the vulnerabilities that are exposed without the legal ramifications.

In this post I want to show you how simple it is to install the OWASP Juice Shop application using Heroku. Juice Shop is a purposely vulnerable application written using NodeJS and Angular. It goes beyond just being an application with some vulnerabilities. It is set up to be a capture the flag (CTF) style application with its own scoreboard.

To learn more about the Juice Shop project, head over to https://www.owasp.org/index.php/OWASP_Juice_Shop_Project. This is the main landing page and looks like the following:

Juice Shop

The first step in installing on Heroku is to make sure you are logged into your Heroku account. If you haven’t created one, do that first. Once you are logged in you should be in your dashboard that looks something like this:

HerokuInstall 1

Now that we are logged into Heroku, let’s head over to the Juice-shop GitHub page at https://github.com/bkimminich/juice-shop.

HerokuInstall 2

As you can see there is a button to “Deploy to Heroku”. Clicking this button will take you back to Heroku and ask for the app name as shown below:

HerokuInstall 3

Once you select a unique app name and the region clicking deploy starts the process. It doesn’t take very long (maybe 3-4 minutes) for the deploy to complete. While it is deploying you will see the build output as shown below:

HerokuInstall 4

Once the deployment is complete, you can click the button to View your new app. This will basically open a new tab at the location of your named instance which is the [name you picked].herokuapp.com as shown below:

HerokuInstall 5

The Juice Shop has a lot of vulnerabilities in it. It is a great way to learn more about how to exploit some of these vulnerabilities and test your skills. If you have little knowledge of application security vulnerabilities or the OWASP Top 10 check out our training courses we have available:

Please remember that hacking is illegal. If you want to learn more about application security and test your skills, do it responsibly and use great applications like the Juice Shop as your targets.

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Installing OWASP JuiceShop with Docker

I am often asked the question by clients and students where people can go to learn hacking techniques for application security. For years, we have had many purposely vulnerable applications available to us. These applications provide a safe environment for us to learn more about hacking applications and the vulnerabilities that are exposed without the legal ramifications.

In this post I want to show you how simple it is to install the OWASP Juice Shop application using a Docker container. Juice Shop is a purposely vulnerable application written using NodeJS and Angular. It goes beyond just being an application with some vulnerabilities. It is set up to be a capture the flag (CTF) style application with its own scoreboard.

To learn more about the Juice Shop project, head over to https://www.owasp.org/index.php/OWASP_Juice_Shop_Project. This is the main landing page and looks like the following:

Juice Shop

On the right hadn’t side there are links to Installation instructions. Clicking on the Docker Link takes us to the following page (https://hub.docker.com/r/bkimminich/juice-shop/) (Scroll down to the section on docker):

Juice Shop Docker

As you can see, there are only 4 steps to getting up and running with Docker. The first step is to install Docker. I won’t cover that here, but make sure you do have it installed before continuing on.

The next step is to pull the Juice-Shop docker container. This container is all set up and configured to run the Juice-Shop. No configurations necessary. To do this enter the command: docker pull bkimminich/juice-shop

Docker Install Step 2

The next step is to run the container. It is performed by simply running the following command: docker run –rm -p 3000:3000 bkimminich/juice-shop

Docker Install Step 3

As you can see, the juice shop is up and running, listening on port 3000. Port 3000 was specified when we called run passing in the -p option. ** If you get an error about the container not being able to start up, try restarting docker. I ran into this a few different times and a docker restart resolved the issue.

If everything is running as expected, we should be able to browse to http://localhost:3000 and access the Juice Shop as shown below:

JuiceShop Running

The Juice Shop has a lot of vulnerabilities in it. It is a great way to learn more about how to exploit some of these vulnerabilities and test your skills. If you have little knowledge of application security vulnerabilities or the OWASP Top 10 check out our training courses we have available:

Please remember that hacking is illegal. If you want to learn more about application security and test your skills, do it responsibly and use great applications like the Juice Shop as your targets.