HTB BedSide Writeup

Machine profile

Platform

Hack The Box

Machine

BedSide

Difficulty

Medium

Published

2026-07-20

Status

active

BedSide is a medium-difficulty Linux machine from Hack The Box set in a clinical environment, and it turns two deceptively mundane pieces of software into a full compromise: a document text-extraction library and a machine-learning inference stack.

The skill areas are path traversal, local file inclusion, insecure deserialization in Python applications, and the privilege escalation patterns that come from services running with more access than they need. Python security is the through-line, and the machine is a good place to meet two of its most common vulnerability classes in the same box.

It suits readers interested in Python security and in the overlap between ordinary file handling and genuinely dangerous behaviour. It is also a useful reminder that machine-learning model files should be treated as executable content rather than inert data. The escalation to root is a writable service rather than a memory-corruption bug, which keeps it realistic and approachable.

What this machine covers

What the finished writeup contains

When BedSide retires, the complete walkthrough publishes here unchanged — every command, output and screenshot from the actual box, in the order it was solved.

1. Reconnaissance Port scanning, service fingerprinting and attack-surface mapping
2. Initial foothold The first authenticated or unauthenticated execution path
3. Enumeration Deeper inspection of the exposed services and their configuration
4. Exploitation Chaining the weaknesses found into a working exploit
5. Credential recovery Secrets, keys and hashes, and how they were obtained
6. Privilege escalation The route from the foothold account to a root shell
7. Flags User and root flag capture