Brute forcing http digest with Hydra - brute-force

Question

I am having some trouble brute forcing a HTTP digest form with Hydra. I am using the following command however when proxied through burp suite hydra I can see hydra is using basic auth and not digest.
How do I get hydra to use the proper auth type?
Command:
hydra -l admin -P /usr/share/wordlists/rockyou.txt 127.0.0.1 -vV http-get /digest
Request as seen in proxy:
GET /digest HTTP/1.1
Host: 127.0.0.1
Connection: close
Authorization: Basic YWRtaW46aWxvdmV5b3U=
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (Hydra)

Answer 1

I have studied this case, if the digest method is implemented on Nginx or apache servers level, hydra might work. But if the authentication is implemented on the application server like Flask, Expressjs, Django, it will not work at all
You can create a bash script for password spraying
#!/bin/bash
cat $1 | while read USER; do
cat $2 | while read PASSWORD; do
if curl -s $3 -c /tmp/cookie --digest -u $USER:$PASSWORD | grep -qi "unauth"
then
continue
else
echo [+] Found $USER:$PASSWORD
exit 0
fi
done
done
Save this file as app.sh
$ chmod +x app.sh
$ ./app.sh /path/to/users.txt /path/to/passwords.txt http://example.com/path

Answer 2

Since no Hydra version was specified, I assume the latest one: 9.2.
#tbhaxor is correct:
Against a server like Apache or nginx Hydra works. Flask using digest authentication as recommended in the standard documentation does not work (details later). You could add the used web server so somebody can verify this.
Hydra does not provide explicit parameters to distinguish between basic and digest authentication.
Technically, it first sends a request that attempts to authenticate itself via basic authentication. After that it evaluates the corresponding response.
The specification of digest authentication states that the web application has to send a header WWW-Authenticate : Digest ... in the response if the requested documented is protected using the scheme.
So Hydra now can distinguish between the two forms of authentication.
If it receives this response (cf. code), it sends a second attempt using digest authentication.
The reason why you only can see basic auth and not digest requests is due to the default setting of what Hydra calls "tasks". This is set to 16 by default, which means it initially creates 16 threads.
Thus, if you go to the 17th request in your proxy you will find a request using digest auth. You can also see the difference if you set the number of tasks to 1 with the parameter -t 1.
Following 3 Docker setups where you can test the differences in basic auth (nginx), digest auth(nginx) and digest auth(Flask) using "admin/password" credentials based upon your example:
basic auth:
cat Dockerfile.http_basic_auth
FROM nginx:1.21.3
LABEL maintainer="secf00tprint"
RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y apache2-utils
RUN touch /usr/share/nginx/html/.htpasswd
RUN htpasswd -db /usr/share/nginx/html/.htpasswd admin password
RUN sed -i '/^ location \/ {/a \ auth_basic "Administrator\x27s Area";\n\ auth_basic_user_file /usr/share/nginx/html/.htpasswd;' /etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf
:
sudo docker build -f Dockerfile.http_basic_auth -t http-server-basic-auth .
sudo docker run -ti -p 127.0.0.1:8888:80 http-server-basic-auth
:
hydra -l admin -P /usr/share/wordlists/rockyou.txt 127.0.0.1 -s 8888 http-get /
digest auth (nginx):
cat Dockerfile.http_digest
FROM ubuntu:20.10
LABEL maintainer="secf00tprint"
RUN apt-get update && \
# For digest module
DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get install -y curl unzip \
# For nginx
build-essential libpcre3 libpcre3-dev zlib1g zlib1g-dev libssl-dev libgd-dev libxml2 libxml2-dev uuid-dev make apache2-utils expect
RUN curl -O https://nginx.org/download/nginx-1.21.3.tar.gz
RUN curl -OL https://github.com/atomx/nginx-http-auth-digest/archive/refs/tags/v1.0.0.zip
RUN tar -xvzf nginx-1.21.3.tar.gz
RUN unzip v1.0.0.zip
RUN cd nginx-1.21.3 && \
./configure --prefix=/usr/share/nginx --sbin-path=/usr/sbin/nginx --conf-path=/etc/nginx/nginx.conf --http-log-path=/var/log/nginx/access.log --error-log-path=/var/log/nginx/error.log --lock-path=/var/lock/ nginx.lock --pid-path=/run/nginx.pid --modules-path=/etc/nginx/modules --add-module=../nginx-http-auth-digest-1.0.0/ && \
make && make install
COPY generate.exp /usr/share/nginx/html/
RUN chmod u+x /usr/share/nginx/html/generate.exp && \
cd /usr/share/nginx/html/ && \
expect -d generate.exp
RUN sed -i '/^ location \/ {/a \ auth_digest "this is not for you";' /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
RUN sed -i '/^ location \/ {/i \ auth_digest_user_file /usr/share/nginx/html/passwd.digest;' /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
CMD nginx && tail -f /var/log/nginx/access.log -f /var/log/nginx/error.log
:
cat generate.exp
#!/usr/bin/expect
set timeout 70
spawn "/usr/bin/htdigest" "-c" "passwd.digest" "this is not for you" "admin"
expect "New password: " {send "password\r"}
expect "Re-type new password: " {send "password\r"}
wait
:
sudo docker build -f Dockerfile.http_digest -t http_digest .
sudo docker run -ti -p 127.0.0.1:8888:80 http_digest
:
hydra -l admin -P /usr/share/wordlists/rockyou.txt 127.0.0.1 -s 8888 http-get /
digest auth (Flask):
cat Dockerfile.http_digest_fask
FROM ubuntu:20.10
LABEL maintainer="secf00tprint"
RUN apt-get update -y && \
apt-get install -y python3-pip python3-dev
# We copy just the requirements.txt first to leverage Docker cache
COPY ./requirements.txt /app/requirements.txt
WORKDIR /app
RUN pip3 install -r requirements.txt
COPY ./app.py /app/
CMD ["flask", "run", "--host=0.0.0.0"]
:
cat requirements.txt
Flask==2.0.2
Flask-HTTPAuth==4.5.0
:
cat app.py
from flask import Flask
from flask_httpauth import HTTPDigestAuth
app = Flask(__name__)
app.secret_key = 'super secret key'
auth = HTTPDigestAuth()
users = {
"admin" : "password",
"john" : "hello",
"susan" : "bye"
}
#auth.get_password
def get_pw(username):
if username in users:
return users.get(username)
return None
#app.route("/")
#auth.login_required
def hello_world():
return "<p>Flask Digest Demo</p>"
:
sudo docker build -f Dockerfile.http_digest_flask -t digest_flask .
sudo docker run -ti -p 127.0.0.1:5000:5000 digest_flask
:
hydra -l admin -P /usr/share/wordlists/rockyou.txt 127.0.0.1 -s 5000 http-get /
If you want to see more information I wrote about it in more detail here.