Exploiting a path traversal vulnerability with NSE

Path traversal vulnerabilities exists in many web applications. Nmap NSE gives penetration testers the ability to quickly write scripts to exploit them. Lua also supports string captures, which help a lot when extracting information using patterns with a simpler syntax than regular expressions.

This recipe will teach you how to write an NSE script to exploit a path traversal vulnerability existing in some models of TP-link routers.

How to do it...

We will write an NSE script that exploits a path traversal vulnerability in several TP-link routers. We will take advantage of a few NSE libraries and Lua's string library:

1. Create the file http-tplink-dir-traversal.nse and fill the required NSE information tags:

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