HTB Stream Writeup | Airport Infrastructure to Root

Machine profile

Platform

Hack The Box

Machine

Stream

Difficulty

Medium

Published

2026-10-11

Status

active

Stream is a medium-difficulty Linux machine from Hack The Box, set in an airport's interconnected service environment. The path through the box rewards careful enumeration across web services, databases and the data pipeline joining them.

The techniques include investigating an exposed application diagnostic endpoint, tracing credentials through service data, exploiting unsafe XML processing for local file disclosure, and following a scheduled background task to understand the final privilege escalation. Each discovery provides context for the next part of the chain.

Stream is a good fit for readers comfortable with Linux enumeration who want practice connecting findings across multiple services. The full walkthrough is available to the owner while the machine is active.

What this machine covers

What the finished writeup contains

When Stream 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