8009 - Pentesting Apache JServ Protocol (AJP) - HackTricks

# 8009 - Pentesting Apache JServ Protocol (AJP)

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## Basic Information

From https://diablohorn.com/2011/10/19/8009-the-forgotten-tomcat-port/

> AJP is a wire protocol. It an optimized version of the HTTP protocol to allow a standalone web server such as Apache to talk to Tomcat. Historically, Apache has been much faster than Tomcat at serving static content. The idea is to let Apache serve the static content when possible, but proxy the request to Tomcat for Tomcat related content.

Also interesting:

> The ajp13 protocol is packet-oriented. A binary format was presumably chosen over the more readable plain text for reasons of performance. The web server communicates with the servlet container over TCP connections. To cut down on the expensive process of socket creation, the web server will attempt to maintain persistent TCP connections to the servlet container, and to reuse a connection for multiple request/response cycles

Default port: 8009

    PORT     STATE SERVICE
    8009/tcp open  ajp13

## CVE-2020-1938 'Ghostcat'

This is an LFI vuln which allows to get some files like `WEB-INF/web.xml` which contains credentials. This is an exploit to abuse the vulnerability and AJP exposed ports might be vulnerable to it.

The patched versions are at or above 9.0.31, 8.5.51, and 7.0.100.

## Enumeration

### Automatic

    nmap -sV --script ajp-auth,ajp-headers,ajp-methods,ajp-request -n -p 8009 <IP>

### Brute force

## AJP Proxy

### Nginx Reverse Proxy + AJP

(Checkout the Dockerized version)

It's possible to communicate with an open AJP proxy port (8009 TCP) by using the Nginx `ajp_module` apache module and access the Tomat Manager from this port which could ultimately lead to RCE in the vulnerable server.

- Start downloading Nginx from https://nginx.org/en/download.html and then compile it with the ajp module:

    # Compile Nginx with the ajp module
    git clone https://github.com/dvershinin/nginx_ajp_module.git
    cd nginx-version
    sudo apt install libpcre3-dev
    ./configure --add-module=`pwd`/../nginx_ajp_module --prefix=/etc/nginx --sbin-path=/usr/sbin/nginx --modules-path=/usr/lib/nginx/modules
    make
    sudo make install
    nginx -V

- Then, comment the `server` block and add the following in the `http` block in `/etc/nginx/conf/nginx.conf`.

    upstream tomcats {
    	server <TARGET_SERVER>:8009;
    	keepalive 10;
    	}
    server {
    	listen 80;
    	location / {
    		ajp_keep_conn on;
    		ajp_pass tomcats;
    	}
    }

- Finally, start nginx (`sudo nginx`) and check it works by accessing `http://127.0.0.1`

### Nginx Dockerized-version

    git clone https://github.com/ScribblerCoder/nginx-ajp-docker
    cd nginx-ajp-docker

Replace `TARGET-IP` in `nginx.conf` witg AJP IP then build and run

    docker build . -t nginx-ajp-proxy
    docker run -it --rm -p 80:80 nginx-ajp-proxy

### Apache AJP Proxy

It's also possible to use an Apache AJP proxy to access that port instead of Nginx.

## References

- https://github.com/yaoweibin/nginx_ajp_module

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