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Creation of /home/zapotek/ folder

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Louis Nadeau

16 Feb, 2015 03:42 PM

Hi

On two different machines (Kali instance) I noticed the creation of a "zapotek" folder under /home after the installation of Arachni. This folder contains a bunch of "cache" files (see screenshot) under /home/zapotek/arachni-build-dir/arachni/system/usr/var/cache/fontconfig. It seems like and issue with the build or install script.

Thanks

• 2015-02-16_1039.png 29.3 KB

1. Support Staff 1 Posted by Tasos Laskos on 16 Feb, 2015 03:45 PM

   

   Oh FFS fontconfig doesn't dynamically resolve $HOME. I'll look into this, thanks for the heads-up.

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2. Support Staff 2 Posted by Tasos Laskos on 16 Feb, 2015 03:53 PM

   

   OK, the build scripts shouldn't do this. How did you install Arachni?

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3. 3 Posted by Louis Nadeau on 16 Feb, 2015 04:07 PM

   

   There was a couple attempts at installing it in these machines and I'm not clear which one did it. If you cannot find the issue, I will create a fresh Kali instance and will try to find which install method did it. The first install was done using the Kali package, however it was removed because it is outdated. Then a naïve git clone and bundle install of https://github.com/Arachni/arachni was attempted but failed. Finally we followed the instruction here : https://github.com/Arachni/arachni-ui-web/tree/framework-v1.1#linux... like civilized people and without surprise it worked.

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4. Support Staff 4 Posted by Tasos Laskos on 16 Feb, 2015 04:17 PM

   

   Can you also try the official packages and see if they create that dir please?

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5. 5 Posted by Louis Nadeau on 16 Feb, 2015 04:35 PM

   

   Ok, it is when the arachni-web is started or the first scan is started through the web-ui that the folder appear.

   Starting from a clean Kali without Arachni, I installed the default package and check under /home and the zapotek folder was not there. Then I started arachni_web and launched a scan and the folder appeared. See the (truncated) console log :

   root@kali:/home# apt-get install arachni
   Reading package lists... Done
   Building dependency tree
   Reading state information... Done
   The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
   libafpclient0 libcrypt-passwdmd5-perl libmozjs22d xulrunner-22.0 Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them.
   The following NEW packages will be installed:
   arachni 0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 31 not upgraded.
   Need to get 69.8 MB of archives.
   After this operation, 232 MB of additional disk space will be used.
   Get:1 http://http.kali.org/kali/ kali/main arachni amd64 1.0.2-0.5.3-0kali1 [69.8 MB]
   Fetched 69.8 MB in 2min 44s (425 kB/s)
   Selecting previously unselected package arachni.
   (Reading database ... 353776 files and directories currently installed.) Unpacking arachni (from .../arachni_1.0.2-0.5.3-0kali1_amd64.deb) ...
   Setting up arachni (1.0.2-0.5.3-0kali1) ...
   root@kali:/home# ls
   root@kali:/home# arachni_web
   arachni_web arachni_web_change_password arachni_web_create_user arachni_web_import arachni_web_task
   root@kali:/home# arachni_web
   Thin web server (v1.6.2 codename Doc Brown)
   Maximum connections set to 1024
   Listening on 0.0.0.0:9292, CTRL+C to stop
   127.0.0.1 - - [16/Feb/2015 11:27:48] "GET /unauthenticated HTTP/1.1" 302 - 0.0492
   127.0.0.1 - - [16/Feb/2015 11:27:48] "GET /d/users/sign_in HTTP/1.1" 200 - 0.0659
   127.0.0.1 - - [16/Feb/2015 11:27:48] "GET %2Fassets%2Fapplication-2ecd5f621f319192858fd62ec85c04db.css HTTP/1.1" 200 157194 0.0050
   127.0.0.1 - - [16/Feb/2015 11:27:48] "GET %2Fassets%2Fapplication-2fe2bd4760bc8fce81bfba445116f8e2.js HTTP/1.1" 200 349355 0.0074
   127.0.0.1 - - [16/Feb/2015 11:27:48] "GET /404 HTTP/1.1" 404 728 0.0031
   [----truncated----] 127.0.0.1 - - [16/Feb/2015 11:28:35] "GET /scans/1.js?overview=false&scan_id=1&tab=all HTTP/1.1" 200 - 0.0818
   ^CI, [2015-02-16T11:28:37.954057 #28931] INFO -- System: Shutting down in 2 seconds... I, [2015-02-16T11:28:38.536497 #28931] INFO -- Call: service.native_progress [127.0.0.1]
   Stopping ...
   root@kali:/home# ls
   zapotek
   root@kali:/home#

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6. Support Staff 6 Posted by Tasos Laskos on 17 Feb, 2015 11:57 PM

   

   So, it seems that fontconfig grabs the compile-time --prefix and uses it for the cache dir, and if it's not available it creates it with something like mkdir -p.
   Which is only a problem when Arachni is being run as root, otherwise /home/zapotek/ won't be able to be created.

   I don't really have any idea of how to configure this properly.

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7. 7 Posted by Louis Nadeau on 18 Feb, 2015 07:46 PM

   

   could you change the fontconfig path to something like tmp ? I really don't know a thing about fontconfig but googling for "fontconfig" and "cache" I see things like :
   "export XDG_CACHE_HOME=/path/to/cachedir" that can be use to change the location of the cache. Maybe you could to this prior to compiling the arachni package ?

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8. Support Staff 8 Posted by Tasos Laskos on 18 Feb, 2015 07:54 PM

   

   I think that this is enforced during runtime, not compile-time. And I tried it that too but did no good. Unless I did something wrong...

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9. 9 Posted by Louis Nadeau on 18 Feb, 2015 08:11 PM

   

   A bad workaround could be to have a special user with its home in /tmp/ for when you are compiling :P

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10. Support Staff 10 Posted by Tasos Laskos on 18 Feb, 2015 08:39 PM

    

    Nah, it doesn't just grab the username, it uses the ./configure --prefix directory which points to a directory in the package which is of course under my username.

    However, I could just build the packages under /tmp so that the --prefix at the time will be something like /tmp/arachni-build-dir/arachni/system/usr/var/cache/fontconfig.

    Nice idea man. :)

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11. Tasos Laskos closed this discussion on 05 Mar, 2015 05:58 PM.