CTF *

The IDS Bypass contest was held at the Positive Hack Days conference for the third time (for retrospective, here's . This year we created six game hosts, each with a flag. To get the flag, participants had either to exploit a vulnerability on the server or to fulfill another condition, for example, to enumerate lists of domain users.

The tasks and vulnerabilities themselves were quite straightforward. The difficulty laid in bypassing the IDS: the system inspected network traffic from participants using special rules that look for attacks. If such a rule was triggered, the participant's network request was blocked, and the bot sent them the text of the triggered rule in Telegram.

And yes, this year we tried to move away from the usual CTFd and IDS logs towards a more convenient Telegram bot. All that was needed to take part was to message the bot and pick a username. The bot then sent an OVPN file to connect to the game network, after which all interaction (viewing tasks and the game dashboard, delivering flags) took place solely through the bot. This approach paid off 100%!

Description

The WS-Routing Protocol is a protocol for exchanging SOAP messages from an initial message sender to receiver, typically via a set of intermediaries. The WS-Routing protocol is implemented as a SOAP extension, and is embedded in the SOAP Header. «WS-Routing» is often used to provide a way to direct XML traffic through complex environments and transactions by allowing interim way stations in the XML path to assign routing instructions to an XML document.

Taking a minimalist approach, WS-Routing encapsulates a message path within a SOAP message, so that the message contains enough information to be sent across the Internet using transports like TCP and UDP while supporting:

• The SOAP message path model,
• Full-duplex, one-way message patterns,
• Full-duplex, request-response message patterns, and
• Message correlation.

Routing Detours are a type of «Man in the Middle» attack where Intermediaries can be injected or «hijacked» to route sensitive messages to an outside location. Routing information (either in the HTTP header or in WS-Routing header) can be modified en route and traces of the routing can be removed from the header and message such that the receiving application none the wiser that a routing detour has occurred. 

This is an English-language summary of two absolutely outstanding articles written by Vitaliy Malkin from «Informzashita» whose team, True0xA3, became the winners of the prestigious black hat competition The Standoff during Positive Hack Days 9 in May of 2019.

Vitaliy has published three detailed articles on Habr, two of which were dedicated to the description of the strategies that True0xA3 team used before and during the competition to secure this team the title of the winners. I felt that the only thing that those two articles were lacking was a summary in English so that a wider audience of readers could enjoy them. So, below is the summary of two articles by Vitaliy Malkin, together with images Vitaliy published to clarify his points. Vitaliy has OKed me doing the translation and publishing it.