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Unchecked JSON Structure

container-security-container-host-security-firewall | Level: Easy  | Total Lab Runs: 0 | Premium Lab

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A group of developers was migrating their monolithic applications to microservices architecture. Every developer had a low privileged account on the server. But as building docker images and running containers require additional privileges. Hence, the developers were added to the docker group. However, allowing a low privileged user to start a docker container is equivalent to providing root access on the host machine. And, the administrator was aware of this issue. Hence, he deployed a 3rd party docker firewall plugin which restricts the developers to a selective set of operations.

In this lab exercise, the student user can run a container but cannot provide additional privileges to it. The docker client interacts with the docker socket using the HTTP REST API and each request passes through the docker firewall plugin. For performing various checks, the firewall follows the JSON structure provided in the official docker API engine documentation. Although necessary checks have been made, the firewall can be bypassed to run a privileged container. The misconfiguration can be exploited by providing the docker socket with a different JSON structure than the one sent by the docker client.

Objective: Run a privileged container, leverage it to escalate to the root user on the host machine and retrieve the flag! 



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