August 2017 – Nicholas Sherlock

This guide is obsolete, please see the new guide for Proxmox 8 here

I wanted to emulate MIPS guests on my Proxmox hypervisor so that I could do some security research on router firmware. Unfortunately, Proxmox has customised some of the QEMU packages and their dependencies, which makes it difficult to install the standard Debian qemu-system-mips package. In particular, Proxmox provides its own pve-libspice-server1 package which conflicts with the libspice-server1 package that vanilla QEMU depends on, so attempting to install it will complain:

Some packages could not be installed.

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 qemu-system-mips : Depends: libspice-server1 (>= 0.12.5)

To solve this, we need to build a modified version of the package from source.

Continue reading Emulating MIPS guests in Proxmox 5

After seeing this arbitrary command execution vulnerability in Ubiquiti equipment, discovered by SEC Consult, I was intrigued. In that bug, code that would have been secure on a more recent version of PHP was rendered vulnerable because of the ancient PHP version used (2.0.1, which is nearly 20 years old). I wanted to see what other bugs might be caused by PHP that works in unexpected ways.

My friend owns a “NanoBeam AC” running firmware WA_v8.0.1, so I downloaded that firmware from Ubiquiti’s website and unpacked it with binwalk. I found a bunch of PHP scripts, a custom patched PHP 2.0.1 binary, and a custom patched Lighttpd server which handles session management and serves the files.

Continue reading Login bypass in Ubiquiti airMAX/airOS before 8.0.2, 7.2.5, 6.0.2, 5.6.15 if airControl web-UI was used