Vulnerability Summary Report
Date of Contact: June 5, 2009 13:30 GMT -0400
Author: Justin C. Klein Keane <justin_at_madirish.net>
Vendor Response: See below
Details of this vulnerability are also posted at the public URL
http://lampsecurity.org/drupal-flag-module-vulnerabilities
Description of Vulnerability:
- - - -----------------------------
Drupal (http://drupal.org) is a robust content management system (CMS)
written in PHP and MySQL that provides extensibility through various
third party modules. The Flag module (http://drupal.org/project/flag)
"is a flexible flagging system that is completely customizable by the
administrator. Using this module, the site administrator can provide any
number of flags for nodes, comments, or users. Some possibilities
include bookmarks, marking important, friends, or flag as offensive.
With extensive views integration, you can create custom lists of popular
content or keep tabs on important content."
The Flag module contains several cross site scripting vulnerabilities
because it does not properly sanitize output of role names before
display. The Flag module also contains cross site scripting
vulnerabilities because it fails to properly sanitize content type
names. Additionally the Flag module contains a SQL injection
vulnerability because it does not properly sanitize variables before
concatenating them into a SQL query.
Systems affected:
- - - -----------------
Drupal 6.12 with Flag 6.x-1.1 was tested and shown to be vulnerable.
Impact:
- - - -------
XSS vulnerabilities may expose site administrative accounts to
compromise which could lead to web server process compromise. SQL
injection attack can manipulate the Drupal database, compromising data,
exposing credentials, and could allow injection of XSS attacks in node
content.
Mitigating factors:
- - - -------------------
The Flag module must be installed. To carry out an role name XSS
exploit against the Flag module the attacker must be able to inject
malicious content into role names, which is possible for authenticated
users with the 'administer permissions' permission. To carry out the
content type XSS exploit against the Flag module the attacker must be
able to inject malicious content into content type names, which is
possible for authenticated users with the 'administer content types'
permission. The SQL injection vulnerability has not yet been shown to
be exploitable.
Technical details:
- - ------------------------
The Flag module uses the Drupal user_roles() function from user.module,
which fails to sanitize role names before returning them (this is a
known issue in Drupal 6.12 -
http://lampsecurity.org/drupal-role-xss-vulnerability). On line 416 of
flag.module the $roles variable is composed without sanitizing the
return value of the user_roles() function. This leads to arbitrary HTML
injection. The Flag module also fails to sanitize content type names
returned by the node_get_types() function in flag.module on line 708.
The variables used to construct $result on line 40 of
includes/flag_handler_argument_content_id.inc are not sanitized and
could be used to perform SQL injection.
Vendor Response
- ---------------
The vendor classifies these vulnerabilities as bugs and has reported
them to the module maintainer for a fix. Ref: http://drupal.org/node/483218
- --
Justin C. Klein Keane
http://www.MadIrish.net
http://www.LAMPSecurity.org