VaultBreaker

A tool to decrypt values stored in a JBoss vault

Background

Plaintext values can be removed from a JBoss installation's standalone.xml, and stored in a vault. The native tooling provided (EAP_HOME/bin/vault.sh) only allows you to modify values in the vault, and not retrieve or view them. But with access to the standalone.xml file, the keystore, and the vault file you can decrypt and retrieve all values inside the vault.

This wasnt the most trivial thing to do, because I'm not great with Java, and the POCs I came across were outdated and no longer worked. Hopefully this tool will work for the next couple of years.

Setup

Collect files from server

Place the following 3 files into the inputs directory:

• stanalone.xml from /path/to/jboss/standalone/configuration/standalone.xml.
• Grab the keystore - it can be found from the KEYSTORE_URL in the standalone.xml file. It is named jbvault.jks by default, but the name can be modified.
• Grab the vault - from what I have seen, it is called VAULT.dat and stored in the ENC_FILE_DIR value in the standalone.xml file.

Setup a python virtual environment, with dependencies

Use whatever method you are familar with. Here is an example using virtualenv

virtualenv -p python3 .venv
source .venv/bin/activate 
pip install -r requirements.txt

Update filenames if required

If your vault is not named VAULT.dat, the keystore is not named jbvault.jks, or the stanadlone file is not named standalone.xml then change lines 7-9 in vaultbreaker3.py as required.

Decrypting the vault contents

Just execute the script after completing the setup:

python vaultbreaker3.py

The script will pull the appropriate values from the XML file, list all the values inside the vault, and then decrypt them 1-by-1 using jboss_decrypt_vault.java.

Notes

Items in the vault are referenced in standalone.xml using the following syntax: VAULT::VAULT_BLOCK::ATTRIBUTE_NAME::1

I have only seen the first value of the attribute (::1) being referenced, so this is hardcoded in the logic in jboss_decrypt_vault.java

I have provided jboss_decrypt_vault_hardcoded.java if you would like to hardcode the exact value you would like to retrieve. You will need to update the various values in the script with the appropriate values from standalone.xml, and then provide a reference to the value you would like to retrieve from the vault.