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Readable Thrift

24 April 2018

By James Chambers

Research Research Reverse Engineering Tool Release

Introduction

Apache Thrift is a popular framework for creating cross-language RPC services. Developers use Thrift definition files to define data structures and generate RPC message handling code from them. This code handles reading and generating Thrift RPC messages in a common protocol format. It can be difficult and tedious to perform manual black-box testing or analysis of these messages since the underlying protocol formats are not meant to be read or edited by humans. Any significant amount of testing would likely require custom tooling.

Readable Thrift makes binary Thrift protocol messages easy to work with by converting them to and from a human-friendly format. This makes the manual analysis of and tampering with binary format Thrift messages just as easy as working with plaintext protocols like HTTP.

The library is implemented in Java, enabling integration with extensions for popular web application testing tools that run on the JVM, such as Burp and ZAP. All one has to do to get an analysis or tampering tool up and running is parse out the appropriate bytes and pass them to the codec.

To demonstrate how the human-readable JSON will look, let’s take an example Base64-encoded binary blob extracted from some application traffic:

$ base64 -D | hexdump
gAEAAQAAAAVsb2dpbgAAAAAMAAALAAAAAAAIY29vbHVzZXILAAEAAAALcGFzc3dvcmQxMjMAAA==
00000000: 8001 0001 0000 0005 6c6f 6769 6e00 0000  ........login...
00000010: 000c 0000 0b00 0000 0000 0863 6f6f 6c75  ...........coolu
00000020: 7365 720b 0001 0000 000b 7061 7373 776f  ser.......passwo
00000030: 7264 3132 3300 00                        rd123..

The “login”, username, and password strings hint that this is an authentication request. If one wanted to tamper with this message on the fly, they would have to look up the internal details of the Thrift protocol binary format parser, figure out the structure of the message with a hex editor, and then manually update each field. In the case of the username and password strings, it would also be necessary to update the prefixed length values in addition to the strings themselves. This would be a tedious, error prone, and time consuming process. Readable Thrift makes this process simpler; here is the same message when passed to it:

Enter Base64 encoded message or JSON object (or q to quit): gAEAAQAAAAVsb2dpbgAAAAAMAAALAAAAAAAIY29vbHVzZXILAAEAAAALcGFzc3dvcmQxMjMAAA==
{"message": {
    "name": "login",
    "type": "call",
    "fields": [{
        "id": 0,
        "type": "struct",
        "value": [
            {
                "id": 0,
                "type": "string",
                "value": "cooluser"
            },
            {
                "id": 1,
                "type": "string",
                "value": "password123"
            }
        ]
    }],
    "seqid": 0
}}

Now we can easily verify that the message describes a call to the “login” method, with a struct containing two string values as the argument. Updating the string values is as simple as editing the value JSON fields and passing the new JSON text back to the codec. All length prefixes and other details of the binary format will be handled automatically.

It is also possible to add new fields to test out possible optional parameters. Maybe there is an admin or debug boolean flag? Or a list of permission IDs? Describe a new field with an id, type, and value, and then add it to the fields array:

Enter Base64 encoded message or JSON object (or q to quit): {"message": {
    "name": "login",
    "type": "call",
    "fields": [{
        "id": 0,
        "type": "struct",
        "value": [
            {
                "id": 0,
                "type": "string",
                "value": "differentuser"
            },
            {
                "id": 1,
                "type": "string",
                "value": "differentpassword!"
            }
        ]
    },
    {"id": 1, "type": "bool", "value": true},
    {"id": 2, "type": "list", "value":
        {
            "elemType": "i32",
            "list": [1, 2, 3]
        }
    },
    {"id": 3, "type": "map", "value":
        {
            "keyType": "string",
            "valueType": "string",
            "map": {
                "dog": "bark",
                "cat": "meow"
            }
        }
    }],
    "seqid": 0
}}
gAEAAQAAAAVsb2dpbgAAAAAMAAALAAAAAAANZGlmZmVyZW50dXNlcgsAAQAAABJkaWZmZXJlbnRwYXNzd29yZCEAAgABAQ8AAggAAAADAAAAAQAAAAIAAAADDQADCwsAAAACAAAAA2NhdAAAAARtZW93AAAAA2RvZwAAAARiYXJrAA==

Below is the updated message converted back to the Thrift binary protocol:

$ base64 -D | hexdump
gAEAAQAAAAVsb2dpbgAAAAAMAAALAAAAAAANZGlmZmVyZW50dXNlcgsAAQAAABJkaWZmZXJlbnRwYXNzd29yZCEAAgABAQ8AAggAAAADAAAAAQAAAAIAAAADDQADCwsAAAACAAAAA2NhdAAAAARtZW93AAAAA2RvZwAAAARiYXJrAA==
00000000: 8001 0001 0000 0005 6c6f 6769 6e00 0000  ........login...
00000010: 000c 0000 0b00 0000 0000 0d64 6966 6665  ...........diffe
00000020: 7265 6e74 7573 6572 0b00 0100 0000 1264  rentuser.......d
00000030: 6966 6665 7265 6e74 7061 7373 776f 7264  ifferentpassword
00000040: 2100 0200 0101 0f00 0208 0000 0003 0000  !...............
00000050: 0001 0000 0002 0000 0003 0d00 030b 0b00  ................
00000060: 0000 0200 0000 0363 6174 0000 0004 6d65  .......cat....me
00000070: 6f77 0000 0003 646f 6700 0000 0462 6172  ow....dog....bar
00000080: 6b00

Library usage

The readablethrift library is a Gradle-based Maven package that can be installed included as a dependency in other projects. It exposes four simple methods for encoding and decoding, in raw binary or Base64-encoded form.

Note: Only the standard binary format protocol is currently supported. Compact binary and JSON (different from the readable JSON produced by the codec) are not yet supported.

Decoding Messages – Thrift binary to JSON

  • The ThriftCodec::decode method creates a descriptive org.json.JSONObject instance directly from a raw byte buffer that contains a binary Thrift message.
  • The ThriftCodec::decodeB64String static method will decode a Base64 string and then call decode on it.

Encoding Messages – JSON to Thrift binary

  • The ThriftCodec::encode method converts a descriptive org.json.JSONObject instance to a raw byte buffer containing the equivalent Thrift binary message.
  • The ThriftCodec::b64encodeJson static method will convert a JSON object to Thrift binary format and Base64 encode the result.

Extensibility

The ThriftCodec class is designed to be extensible so that it can handle modifications or extensions to the Thrift binary protocol format, such as extra binary format headers or encapsulation.

Command line usage

To use the interactive command line interface included in the library, use the default Gradle task to build a JAR and then run it with java -jar:

$ ./gradlew

BUILD SUCCESSFUL in 1s
2 actionable tasks: 2 executed
$ java -jar build/libs/readablethrift-0.1.0-all.jar 
Enter Base64 encoded message or JSON object (or q to quit):

Example Integration

To demonstrate usage of the library, I’ll add a new codec to the Decoder Improved extension for Burp Suite. Within a few minutes, you can have a working binary Thrift codec inside Burp!

1. Add the Readable Thrift library to the list of dependencies in build.gradle. This is available from Maven Central:

compile 'trust.nccgroup:readablethrift:1.0.0'

2. Create a new ThriftBinaryDecoder class under trust.nccgroup.decoderimproved:

package trust.nccgroup.decoderimproved;

import org.apache.thrift.TException;
import trust.nccgroup.readablethrift.ThriftCodec;

public class ThriftBinaryDecoder extends ByteModifier {
    public ThriftBinaryDecoder() {
        super("Thrift Binary");
    }

    public byte[] modifyBytes(byte[] input) throws ModificationException {
        ThriftCodec codec = new ThriftCodec();
        try {
            return codec.decode(input).toString(4).getBytes();
        } catch (TException e) {
            throw new ModificationException(e.getMessage());
        }
    }
}

3. Create a new ThriftBinaryEncoder class:

package trust.nccgroup.decoderimproved;

import org.apache.thrift.TException;
import org.json.JSONObject;
import trust.nccgroup.readablethrift.ThriftCodec;

public class ThriftBinaryEncoder extends ByteModifier {
    public ThriftBinaryEncoder() {
        super("Thrift Binary");
    }

    public byte[] modifyBytes(byte[] input) throws ModificationException {
        ThriftCodec codec = new ThriftCodec();
        try {
            String inputString = new String(input);
            JSONObject inputJson = new JSONObject(inputString);
            return codec.encode(inputJson);
        } catch (TException e) {
            throw new ModificationException(e.getMessage());
        }
    }
}

4. Add the decoder to the decoder list in DecodeMode.java:

decoders.add(new ThriftBinaryDecoder());

5. Add the encoder to the encoder list in EncodeMode.java:

encoders.add(new ThriftBinaryEncoder());

6. Run the shadowJar Gradle task to build the new extension JAR.

7. Load it up in Burp Suite!

Conclusion

While the command line interface and Decoder Improved extension provide a convenient interface for editing Thrift messages with Readable Thrift, the original intent and true usefulness of the library will become more apparent when it’s used to automatically translate binary blob Thrift message content in request tampering tools like Burp or ZAP. The human-friendly JSON format is much easier to edit and understand than packed binary buffers.

The Readable Thrift library will be available on Maven Central for easy use as a dependency in a Maven or Gradle-based project. The source code is available on GitHub at https://github.com/nccgroup/readable-thrift, and pull requests are welcome.

Published date:  24 April 2018

Written by:  James Chambers

James Chambers

James Chambers

James is a Senior Security Consultant in the NCC Group Hardware & Embedded Systems practice.