Publications

Java deserialization tricks

19/03/2024
Pentest
During a red team engagement, we faced Java applications exposed on the internet and affected by arbitrary deserialization from user-supplied data. After quickly identifying a well-known gadget chain, we noticed that a WAF was rejecting requests exploiting the vulnerability by detecting specific patterns of the serialized chain, and that an EDR caught our first exploit. Moreover, firewalls were strictly filtering outbound traffic, including DNS. This article will present a few tricks regarding the gadgets that were used to exploit the...

WordPress for Security Audit

15/12/2023
Pentest
WordPress is a major player in the CMS market, powering around 40% of websites today. This widespread adoption has made it an attractive target for security research, as the safety of millions of websites depends on it. In this article, we will study in detail its core architecture: project structure, authorizations mechanisms, hooks, routing system, APIs and plugins.

Using ntdissector to extract secrets from ADAM NTDS files

06/12/2023
Tools
Pentest
During the development of ntdissector, we stumbled upon an AD Lightweight Directory Services (LDS) instance used by an internal application of a customer to store data. Just like AD DS, AD LDS stores the data inside a dit file: adamntds.dit. However, all known tools failed to parse this file while it looks a lot like a NTDS.dit file. In our research, we eventually found an article in cache already explaining a lot of differences with a standard NTDS.dit file. Unfortunately, the associated code was no longer available on GitHub. This ...

Finding a POP chain on a common Symfony bundle : part 2

11/10/2023
Pentest
The Symfony doctrine/doctrine-bundle package is one of the most common bundles installed along Symfony applications. At the time we are releasing this blogpost, it has been downloaded 144 million times, making it an interesting target for unserialize exploitation. If you want to improve your knowledge about PHP unserialize exploitation and see why weak typed languages are considered less secure, this blogpost is for you. The second part of this article will be focused on building a valid POP chain based on the code already analyzed i...

EVM unravelled: recovering ABI from bytecode

10/10/2023
Pentest
The year-over-year growth in the use of decentralized applications and smart contracts brings an increasing prominence of security audits in this domain. Such audits are vital in maintaining the robustness and trustworthiness of platforms built on blockchain technologies like the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). In a full black-box assessment—a methodology where the auditor has no knowledge of the system's inner workings—smart contracts can often appear more opaque compared to traditional centralized applications. This article delves ...

Presentation of the Pentest Team

15/09/2023
Pentest
Are you a potential applicant wishing to know more about Synacktiv's pentest team before actually applying? Or someone considering relying on Synacktiv to perform a security assessment and wondering whether we can handle your project? Or just someone curious and eager to know more? In any case, this blogpost will hopefully enlighten you about key aspects of what we do and how we work.

Finding a POP chain on a common Symfony bundle: part 1

12/09/2023
Pentest
The Symfony doctrine/doctrine-bundle package is one of the most common bundles installed along Symfony applications. At the time we are releasing this blogpost, it has been downloaded 144 million times, making it an interesting target for unserialize exploitation. If you want to improve your knowledge about PHP unserialize exploitation and see why weak typed languages are considered less secure, this blogpost is for you. The first part of this article aims to show a full methodology of POP chain research, it details the full code ana...

Magento for Security Audit

06/09/2023
Pentest
Magento, also known as Adobe Commerce since it was bought by Adobe in 2018, is a popular CMS for e-commerce web applications, powering 2.3% of them as of 2021 (according to Statista). This article provides an overview of its inner workings from a security point of view as well as some key points to keep in mind when auditing Magento-based applications.