Greeting Everyone ! Hope Everything Is Going Good , I Am back With another blog On Web Application Vulnerability Which allow an attacker To Takeover Any User Account By Host Header Poisoning So Today we will Look from Basic About What is Host Header poisoning How an attacker Able to takeover User account Or bypass Application Authentication Schema .
So Before We start If You don’t Know What Is Host header Poisoning in simple word it allow an attacker to bypass HOST: header Schema On Vulnerable Web application as host header specifies which website or web application should process an incoming HTTP request. The web server uses the value of this header to dispatch the request to the specified website or web application.
Specifically In Host Header Injection As we can Redirect An user to attacker controlled Website Right, But Which commonly know and There is no such Impact Because it basically works on Local environment , but we can Improved It impact By Password Reset Poisoning is one such vulnerability, that leverages commonly unthought of headers, such as the Host
header seen in an HTTP request.
How To Verify ?
As commonly Whenever We Browser Web application You will See In Response Section Header that contain Host specifies which website or web application should process an incoming HTTP request. You Can Check it by inspect element in section of network ,
![](https://securiumsolutions.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/image-11.png)
So as You See There is Host: header When Your Serve a particular website But Which Sometimes Vulnerable For host Header Injection.
Most web servers are configured to pass the unrecognized host header to the first virtual host in the list. Therefore, it’s possible to send requests with arbitrary host headers to the first virtual host. Here The Example How We can Check For This Vulnerability :
Here we have Simple Request Which We have captured Through burp,
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: securiumsolutions.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/68.0
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5
To Check Here We need To change Host: section To Your controlled Website And Check it response if you got 200 302 Just Check Response Section If your Controlled Host Is reflected That mean it vulnerable For Host Header Injection ,
If This Now Wor then add X-Forwarded-Host: youraddress.com we can also Host Section To X-Forwarded-Host: section As eg:
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: yoursite.com
X-Forwarded-Host: securiumsolutions.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/68.0
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Alright, As We see How Web application Vulnerable For Host Header Injection Now , How it allow an bad actor To misuse and takeover any user account by Host Header Poisoning ,
Where We need to look ?
- Reset password Functionality
- Signup
- Confirmation Token
Testing Steps:
Step1: Supposed We have Confirmation Page Which Allow users Only after Verification Of Email which sent to user Email right , But here An attacker can Confirm Victim account without Authenticate Victim Email due to Host Headed poisoning Which leak confirmation Token With Attacker Controlled Server.
Here, We have Our target As xyz.com Now we are Creating New account On xyz.com And here In Email which need To verify here To test Simply add Victim email victimmail@gmail.com and Fillup Request And capture Request Using Burp , Before Process Make the functionality Is running under xyz.com or using third party services ,
Now We captured Request On repeater section Now , here simply change Host section , or Add X-Forwarded-Host: that we Discuss Already And Look Your Inbox how it route .
Here We have Different Functionality Which Functionality Running Under Some third party services , Look For Below Screenshot,
![](https://securiumsolutions.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/image-12.png)
As above picture We see Functionality Running Under third party service but it carries Original Host As Parameter “domain” Here Simply Change Domain To Your Controlled Domain , Make sure you have php, SimplePython, or ngrok server that You can capture Leak token If Target Is vulnerable,
Now User When victim click Confirmation Link On His Email At the time he/she click And Attacker Will Get Victim Confirmation Token Inside Attacker Server which Leak Due to Host Header Poisoning,
![](https://securiumsolutions.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/image-13.png)
As Above Pic Now Attacker Can takeover Victim Account Due To Host Header Is not Implement This allow A malicious attacker control of a particular individual’s Account In different scenario .
How To Mitigate This Type Of Issue :
· Validate the headers that supplied into the requests Which You Must Need to configure Properly That an bad actor can’t control.
· Also use multi-factor authentication to prevent account hijacking , and one such method is SMS Authentication.
Conclusion: As Today we Discussed How an application is Vulnerable for Host Header Injection we can say Host header Poisoning also We Discuss How to exploit And How To mitigate against It. Hope You enjoyed ! Bye !
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