Portswigger — Command Injection All Labs Walkthrough(Bug Bounty Prep)[by dollarboysushil]

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InfoSec Write-ups

6 min readFeb 15, 2024

Link to portswigger academy: https://portswigger.net/web-security/os-command-injection

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What is OS command injection?

OS command injection or shell injection is an attack which allows attacker to execute os commands on the server that is running an application.

How OS command injection attack works?

Lets look at an example

https://insecure-website.com/stockStatus?productID=381&storeID=29

In the above url, the application gives stock status by taking two arguments productID and storeID .

To provide the stock information, the application must query various legacy systems. For historical reasons, the functionality is implemented by calling out to a shell command with the product and store IDs as arguments:

stockreport.pl 381 29

The command then outputs the stock status.
If there isn’t any proper sanitization or defenses, attacker can submit & echo abcdef & in productID, which will become
stockreport.pl & echo abcdef& 29

Then the overall output will be
Error — productID was not provided abcdef 29: command not found

Lab 1 : OS command injection, simple case

Link to lab: https://portswigger.net/web-security/os-command-injection/lab-simple

Aim: execute whoami command and get current user name

Click access the lab

Click on View details.

With your burpsuite ready click on check stock.

Select the request created when clicking check stock.
And send this request to repeater

Then change the value of productId to & whoami & then url encode this string using ctrl + U

Then send this request which gives us, output of whoami command.

Lab 1 done ✅

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Lab 2 : Blind OS command injection with time delays

Aim: cause 10sec delay.

Click on Submit Feedback

Enter random data and intercept the request using burpsuit.

select /feedback/submit request and send it to repeater.

When we send this request we get response in 439mills

Then change the value of email parameter to & ping -c 10 127.0.0.1 &
this will send 10 ICMP echo request packets to the loopback address 127.0.0.1.

Then select this payload and Ctrl + U to url encode and send the request.
Now we get response in 9640 millis

Which completes the lab.

Lab 2 done ✅

Lab 3 : Blind OS command injection with output redirection

Link to lab: https://portswigger.net/web-security/os-command-injection/lab-blind-output-redirection

Same as before send the reques to repeater.

Then time change the value of email to & whoami > /var/www/images/output.txt &
This will output the value of whoami command into output.txt file.

Select and url encode the payload and send the request.

Now we need to open the output.txt file which holds the result of whoami command.

Open any of the post form the lab.
Right click on the image and click on open image in new tab.

Then change the value to output.txt which will display the output of whoami command.

Lab 3 done ✅

Lab 4 and 5 needs premium version of burpsuite.