SQL injection on Metasploitable

So I was playing around with the TikiWiki web application on the Metasploitable VM tonight, and I decided that I wanted to try and see if this thing was vulnerable to SQL injection. I did a quick google search and it told me that indeed there were reported SQL injection points for this particular version, but I wanted to try and see if I could find one on my own. So began my manual assault on all the fields and parameters I could see. Finally I found a parameter that is passed on multiple pages but I first got the application to throw an error on the tiki-listpages.php page using the sort_mode= parameter.

Interestingly enough, when I tried to use a tick (') in the sort_mode= parameter, it would just give me an error stating that was an invalid value for that field. I did find that most of this application does sanitize the input from the user, but for some reason this particular parameter did not like integers being put into it and the result is a massive error page yielding all kinds of good info. Here was what I used:

http://192.168.2.109/tikiwiki/tiki-listpages.php?find='&search=find&sort_mode=1

And here is the beautiful error page this throws:

As you can see, this gives us all kinds of good info. One of the big give aways is that fact that this is a mysql database. But if we continue to scroll down, we get even more really interesting info. A quick search for 'password' reveals this:

Wow. It looks like this bad query dumped a configuration file for the entire database including the username and password for the database! And to test it out, I tried logging in through the mysql client on backtrack and sure enough, I was able to view the whole database.

This is a very old version of tikiwiki, 1.9 something I think, and they have long since patched this vulnerability. It is amazing what one small error can produce from the database side of a web application.