Vulnerability Details

The Instance Metadata Service has two mitigations to help protect applications that are vulnerable to SSRF. Namely, the Metadata-Flavor: Google header is required and requests with the X-Forwarded-For header are ignored. The three examples below describe methods for bypassing the first protection, which could expose customers to risk in specific scenarios.

Use any of the following commands to demonstrate issues with the metadata service protections:

  1. Bypass the Metadata-Flavor: Google requirement by including an extra ‘/’ in the URL:
curl 'http://169.254.169.254/computeMetadata//v1/instance/name'
  1. Bypass the Metadata-Flavor: Google requirement by sending an HTTP/1.0 request, which (strangely) dumps all metadata content:
printf "GET / HTTP/1.0\r\n\r\n" | nc 169.254.169.254 80
  1. In some scenarios, an attacker may not fully control a URL. They can use ; in a URL to ignore all content following the semi-colon:
curl -H 'Metadata-Flavor: Google' 'http://169.254.169.254/computeMetadata/v1/instance/name;extra/content'

Attack Scenario

Actor: An attacker exploiting an SSRF vulnerability in an application running in GCP

Target: Service account credentials from metadata service

Outcome: Compromise of those credentials when the metadata service would normally protect them

During a recent penetration test for a client using GCP, we discovered a specific SSRF vulnerability in that client’s application that allowed requests to an arbitrary host with a partially controlled URL (e.g. http://xxx:xx/xxx/yyy, where x is attacker-controlled and y is hardcoded). The URL http://169.254.169.254/computeMetadata//v1/instance/name;yyy allowed bypassing both the Metadata-Flavor requirement and, specific to our client’s vuln, the hardcoded data at the end of the URL. This was due to the way the Metadata Service handled both // and ; sequences in URLs (as shown in #1 and #3 above).

During my research, I haven’t found a scenario where #2 would come up in practice, but it is another example of bypassing the Metadata-Flavor requirement.

Timeline

  • 2019-06-14: Issue reported to Google VRP
  • 2019-06-17: Issue triaged
  • 2019-06-19: Internal bug report filed
  • 2019-07-22: Issue fixed
  • 2019-07-23: VRP issued reward ($5000)