HTB Devhub Writeup

Machine profile

Platform

Hack The Box

Machine

Devhub

Difficulty

Medium

Published

2026-07-26

Status

active

Devhub is a medium-difficulty Linux machine from Hack The Box themed around developer tooling, and its distinguishing feature is that part of the attack surface is a Model Context Protocol server — a newer class of target that is appearing more often as teams wire models into internal systems.

The skill areas are modern web application exploitation, internal service discovery, credential and key material recovery, and Linux privilege escalation through administrative tooling. The underlying lesson is about trust boundaries: an internal-only service still becomes an execution primitive once you have a foothold, and the tokens and keys that tooling holds are usually the real prize.

It suits readers comfortable with Linux internals who want to see protocol-level services treated as an ordinary attack surface — fingerprint it, understand how it handles requests, and then treat what it stores as the objective. It pairs well with the web-focused machines on this site and is a good companion for anyone working with MCP-style deployments.

What this machine covers

What the finished writeup contains

When Devhub 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