Bypassing PHP strcmp() - CSAW 2015 web 200 writeup

Sep 21, 2015 • webchallenges, ctf-web

Well this challenge was very easy and I guess it has the highest number of solves in web category during CSAW 2015. Here we have a simple login form and and we should login to get the flag. But the register is not working and SQL injection also doesn’t seems to work. So I was wondering how can the check be in server side and if it is using php function strcmp() then things would be pretty easy. So I tried capturing the request with tamper data and replaced the password=lol with password[]=lol and it easily bypassed the authentication. And yea it gives back the flag too :)

FOr those who don’t know how this works, lets say we have an example code like this:

$username = $_POST['username'];
$password = $_POST['password'];

$real_password = "original password here";

if (strcmp($password, $real_password) == 0) {
 
 echo "flag{}";
}

If this is the code, if we give post request like this password[]=lol then the $password becomes an array. Now comparing this, instead of throwing an error, it returns NULL and in PHP NULL == 0, which means string comparison passed and we got the flag :)

Anirudh Anand

Head of Product Security & DevSecOps at @CRED_club | Application Security ♥ | CTF lover - @teambi0s | Security Trainer - @7asecurity | certs - eWDP, OSCP, OSWE