How Reverse DNS can help us with XSS, SQLi, RCE...

One day I got the idea to put XSS vector into reverse dns record. You know - sometimes webapplication displays IP address AND reverse lookup. As far as people think that there is no need to sanitize displayed revdns records, because as RFC1034 said:

Note that while upper and lower case letters are allowed in domain
names, no significance is attached to the case.  That is, two names with
the same spelling but different case are to be treated as if identical.

The labels must follow the rules for ARPANET host names.  They must
start with a letter, end with a letter or digit, and have as interior
characters only letters, digits, and hyphen.  There are also some
restrictions on the length.  Labels must be 63 characters or less.

...so (theoretically) there is no possibility to have hostname with dangerous characters such as > < ' " and it's XSS safe, right?

Right.

c40957:~ jakub.zoczek$ host 87.204.122.210

210.122.204.87.in-addr.arpa is an alias for 210.192/26.122.204.87.in-addr.arpa.

210.192/26.122.204.87.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer f\"><img/src=http://monitor.ropchain.org/xss.gif>f.x.32s.pl.

That's my blind xss testing IP address. All I need is to visit websites using this address and every time it will be displayed (and interpreted as html) - it should display 1x1 GIF image from my server. In apache log I'll have informations like IP address, User Agent and Referer - so I know where XSS occur.

To configure this kind of environment you will need:

- at least one IPv4 address
- possibility to configure reverse zone on own DNS server.

So - if you have VPS with some IP addresses and possibility to setup reverse dns - it won't work. In most cases configuration of reverse dns is implemented in customer's web panel and restricted to PTR records. If you have possibility to setup CNAME or NS record for your revdns - that's great and it would work. I tried to search for VPS provider who gives this kind of feature for customers and I didn't found single one.

Also - as far as I know - ISP not often want to give such delegations for only few addresses, but there is no problem for full C class or more - they give then for example delegation for all /24 prefix. In Poland - Orange can be solution - there is possibility to setup CNAME records for few addresses.

After months of searching someone who have full class and can borrow me few IP addresses and give delegation - I finally found friend of my who provided me all I need.

So - lets say you have IP address - 1.2.3.4 - the reverse zone configuration for BIND will look like this:


The 1.2.3.4 file:

As you can see - there is no big differences between normal reverse dns configuration. The most important option is check-names ignore; - it will tell BIND that we want to use illegal characters in our DNS records. :)

Problem is that in multiple languages this IP will be resolved normally (with payload), and in others - not. At the moment I checked that it works fine for Linux host, dig, nslookup, Windows nslookup, PHP dns_get_record, python reversename.from_addr(). In future I want to check all other modern languages reverse lookup implementations.

Happy hunting, and btw - check my Yandex.Metrica XSS ;-)