OWASP WebGoat SQLi mitigation lesson 8

The OWASP WebGoat SQL Injection Mitigation lesson 8 is another blind SQL exercise, very similar to the SQL advanced lesson 5. Actually, I solved it with a similar technique to that one.
The goal is to find the IP of the webgoat-prd server, which is not listed on the page. Try sorting the entries via the GUI and capture the traffic with a proxy. You should see a column parameter in the URL being sent. You can only modify the order by clause of the SQL query being made in the column parameter, but as was explained on the previous page in WebGoat, order by allows you to use case to construct a sub query.
The case construct works like this:

case (true) then something else something_else end

If the case evaluates to true then do the first thing, else do the other thing. Since we are working within the order by clause, there’s really only one thing we can do as then or else, which is sort by one of the returned (column) values. To avoid complicating matters, I used sort by id for true, and sort by IP for false. That way, I could quickly spot if my query was true by checking if the returned data was sorted numerically.
The real question is what to use for the case evaluation. After some messing around I settled on exists and constructed a few queries.

exists(select id from servers where hostname=’webgoat-prd’)

checks if webgoat-prd actually exists in the database. Since the results returned were sorted numerically, it does!

After some trial and error I was able to construct the following final query, which extracts the IP one number at a time. Like in the SQL advanced mission 5, using Burp Intruder makes the task much easier and faster.

http://localhost:8080/WebGoat/SqlInjection/servers?column=(case when exists(select id from servers where hostname=’webgoat-prd’ and substring(ip,1,1)=1) then id else ip end)

If the returned query is sorted by id, then ‘1’ is the first number of the webgoat-prd IP address. As with lesson 5, it is just a question of iterating through all numbers and the starting index of substring. Since we don’t know the length of the IP address beforehand, we should also check for the string ‘.‘ (dot), for example in the 4th and 8th index.

Following the above technique it should be relatively easy to extract the IP address from the database.