Goof - Snyk's vulnerable demo app

A vulnerable Node.js demo application, based on the Dreamers Lab tutorial.

Features

This vulnerable app includes the following capabilities to experiment with:

• Exploitable packages with known vulnerabilities
• Docker Image Scanning for base images with known vulnerabilities in system libraries
• Runtime alerts for detecting an invocation of vulnerable functions in open source dependencies

Running

mongod &

git clone https://github.com/Snyk/snyk-demo-todo
npm install
npm start

This will run Goof locally, using a local mongo on the default port and listening on port 3001 (http://localhost:3001)

Running with docker-compose

docker-compose up --build
docker-compose down

Heroku usage

Goof requires attaching a MongoLab service to be deployed as a Heroku app. That sets up the MONGOLAB_URI env var so everything after should just work.

CloudFoundry usage

Goof requires attaching a MongoLab service and naming it "goof-mongo" to be deployed on CloudFoundry. The code explicitly looks for credentials to that service.

Cleanup

To bulk delete the current list of TODO items from the DB run:

npm run cleanup

Exploiting the vulnerabilities

This app uses npm dependencies holding known vulnerabilities, as well as insecure code that introduces code-level vulnerabilities.

The exploits/ directory includes a series of steps to demonstrate each one.

Vulnerabilities in open source dependencies

Here are the exploitable vulnerable packages:

• Mongoose - Buffer Memory Exposure - requires a version <= Node.js 8. For the exploit demo purposes, one can update the Dockerfile node base image to use FROM node:6-stretch.
• st - Directory Traversal
• ms - ReDoS
• marked - XSS

Vulnerabilities in code

• Open Redirect
• NoSQL Injection
• Command execution
• Cross-site Scripting (XSS)
• Security misconfiguration exposes server information
• Insecure protocol (HTTP) communication

Open redirect

The /admin view introduces a redirectPage query path, as follows in the admin view:

<input type="hidden" name="redirectPage" value="<%- redirectPage %>" />

One fault here is that the redirectPage is rendered as raw HTML and not properly escaped, because it uses <%- > instead of <%= >. That itself, introduces a Cross-site Scripting (XSS) vulnerability via:

http://localhost:3001/login?redirectPage="><script>alert(1)</script>

To exploit the open redirect, simply provide a URL such as redirectPage=https://google.com which exploits the fact that the code doesn't enforce local URLs in index.js:72.

Docker Image Scanning

The Dockerfile makes use of a base image (node:6-stretch) that is known to have system libraries with vulnerabilities.

To scan the image for vulnerabilities, run:

snyk test --docker node:6-stretch --file=Dockerfile

To monitor this image and receive alerts with Snyk:

snyk monitor --docker node:6-stretch

Runtime Alerts

Snyk provides the ability to monitor application runtime behavior and detect an invocation of a function is known to be vulnerable and used within open source dependencies that the application makes use of.

The agent is installed and initialized in app.js.

For the agent to report back to your snyk account on the vulnerabilities it detected it needs to know which project on Snyk to associate with the monitoring. Due to that, we need to provide it with the project id through an environment variable SNYK_PROJECT_ID

To run the Node.js app with runtime monitoring:

SNYK_PROJECT_ID=<PROJECT_ID> npm start

** The app will continue to work normally even if not provided a project id

Fixing the issues

To find these flaws in this application (and in your own apps), run:

npm install -g snyk
snyk wizard

In this application, the default snyk wizard answers will fix all the issues. When the wizard is done, restart the application and run the exploits again to confirm they are fixed.