Server Side Request Forgery
SSRF / Server Side Request Forgery
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SSRF / Server Side Request Forgery
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Server-side request forgery (also known as SSRF) is a web security vulnerability that allows an attacker to induce the server-side application to make HTTP requests to an arbitrary domain of the attacker's choosing. This allows you to:
Make requests to internal services that you wouldn't be able to interact with otherwise.
Force the server to connect to arbitrary external systems, potentially leaking sensitive data such as authorization credentials.
This can even lead to RCE when the SSRF allows you to interact with certain services that outsiders aren't supposed to be able to access (e.g Redis in certain cases).
If the IP address 127.0.0.1 is blocked, then you might be able to get around that by making the request to your-malicious-dns.com and your DNS will resolve the hostname to 127.0.0.1.
You don't even have to pay to do this. There are a number of "wildcard DNS" services, such as , that can be used to resolve a hostname to an internal IP address.
Ipv6 maps to ipv4 with a certain prefix (::ffff:<ipv4>). So if localhost (127.0.0.1) is blocked, then ::ffff:127.0.0.1 might not be.
You can send a HTTP request to a non-HTTP text-based service. In the likely scenario that invalid commands get thrown out without invalidating the entire interaction, you will be able to smuggle valid text-based commands in the middle of the HTTP request. Therefore, you can interact with non-HTTP services
HTTP based protocols:
Elastic
CouchDB
MongoDB
Docker
Text-based protocols:
FTP
SMTP
Redis
Memcached
If gopher is enabled, then that can make your life really easy, but it's usually not.
Often, controls have been put in place to try to prevent protocol smuggling. CRLF Injection is one way to overcome that.
You can’t smuggle SMTP over HTTP, because servers won’t accept http:// requests. It will cut off the connection. But you can smuggle it over HTTPS, because of the TLS handshake.
The Server Name Indication isn’t encrypted in a TLS handshake. If you put a space there, then you can smuggle an SMTP request. This works because of the way Linux’s glibc works. I think normally the after the space part is supposed to be metadata/comment or something.
Before the space is HTTP, and after the space is an SMTP request we smuggled. You should test this using:
Parsing the URL correctly is difficult. There's an RFC for it, but some libraries still do it differently. Issues can arise when there's inconsistency between components that parse URLs differently. For example, when one component verifies an URL and then another one makes a request to it. If the two components parse the URL differently, then you likely have an SSRF vulnerability.
However, often, controls have been put in place to try to prevent protocol smuggling. To read about how to circumvent these controls, read about .
Fantastic talk on how URL parsers can be tricked into doing weird things:
