Solving Portswigger Lab File Path Traversal Simple Case with ZAP

This Portswigger Lab has a path traversal vulnerability, which allows anyone to retrieve any file from the system the webpage is hosted in. In this particular case the laboratory consist on retrieving the /etc/passwd file, demonstrating this way the vulnerability.

If you want to know more about Path Traversal, I suggest looking at the ZAP Path Traversal alert page.

To solve the lab, you have to do the following steps:

• Access the URL provided by Portswigger, which is something like https:[random_letter_numbers].web-security-academy.net/, with the proxy enabled.
• Look in the Site Tree for the requests made by your browser.

• Notice there is a GET: image(filename) on those requests, that loads the image for the products.
• Send that request to the requester (Ctrl+W).
• Change the value of the filename parameter to ../../../etc/passwd to trigger the vulnerability.
• In the Response tab, change the Body type of the response to Text to see that the /etc/passwd is returned.

Congratulations, you solved the lab!!

Here is a video step by step with the explanations: