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# lab-1

## Detecting NoSQL Injection

**Difficulty:** Apprentice

### Lab Description

The product category filter for this lab is powered by a MongoDB NoSQL database and is vulnerable to NoSQL injection.

**Objective:** Perform a NoSQL injection attack that causes the application to display unreleased products.

### Solution

**Step 1 — Identify the injection point**

Navigate to the lab and select a product category, for example **Gifts**. Only a few products are listed. According to the objective, there are unreleased products hidden by the query — the goal is to break out of the filter to expose them.

Capture the category filter request in Burp Suite.

**Step 2 — Confirm the vulnerability**

Test the input with special characters to see if the backend query can be broken:

```
'"`{;$Foo}$Foo \xYZ
```

Injecting a single quote `'` triggers a syntax error, confirming that the input is being passed directly into the query without sanitization. The backend query likely looks something like:

javascript

```javascript
db.filter.find({ "category": 'gifts' })
```

Injecting `gifts'` breaks this into:

javascript

```javascript
db.filter.find({ "category": 'gifts'' })
```

...which is invalid syntax, causing the error.

**Step 3 — Bypass the filter with a tautology**

To dump all products (including unreleased ones), inject a condition that is always true using the MongoDB `||` operator:

```
gifts' || '1'=='1
```

The resulting backend query becomes:

javascript

```javascript
db.filter.find({ "category": 'gifts' || '1'=='1' })
```

Since `'1'=='1'` is always true, the query returns all documents in the collection regardless of their category or release status.

### Conclusion

The application passed user-supplied input directly into a MongoDB query without sanitization, allowing a simple tautology injection to bypass the category filter and expose unreleased products.


---

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