Commix: automating evaluation and exploitation of command injection vulnerabilities in Web applications

Abstract

Despite the prevalence and the high impact of command injection attacks, little attention has been given by the research community to this type of code injections. Although there are many software tools to detect and exploit other types of code injections, such as SQL injections or cross-site scripting, there is no dedicated and specialized software that detects and exploits, automatically, command injection vulnerabilities. This paper proposes an open-source tool that automates the process of detecting and exploiting command injection flaws on Web applications, named as COMMand Injection eXploiter (Commix). We present and elaborate on the software architecture and detection engine of Commix as well its extra functionalities that greatly facilitate penetration testers and security researchers in the detection and exploitation of command injection vulnerabilities. Moreover, based on the knowledge and the practical experience gained from the development of Commix, we propose and analyze new identified techniques that perform side-channel exploitation for command injections allowing an attacker to indirectly deduce the output of the executed command (i.e., also known as blind command injections). Furthermore, we evaluate the detection capabilities of Commix, by performing experiments against various applications. The experimental results show that Commix presents high detection accuracy, while at the same time false positives are eliminated. Finally and more importantly, we analyze several 0-day command injection vulnerabilities that Commix detected in real-world applications. Despite its short release time, Commix has been embraced by the security community and comes preinstalled in many security-oriented operating systems including the well-known Kali Linux.