Hello full-disclosure!
Description:
Joomla CBE suffers from a local file inclusion vulnerability. As CBE
also offers file uploading functionality that allows to upload files
that contain php-code, this can be used to execute arbitary
system-commands on the host with the webservers privileges.
Risk:
High
Affected versions:
Not affaceted:
$ajaxdirekt = JRequest::getVar('ajaxdirekt', null);
$tabname = JRequest::getVar('tabname', null);
if ($ajaxdirekt) {
$tabfile =
Exploitation / poc:
index.php?option=com_cbe&task=userProfile&user=23&ajaxdirekt=true&tabname=…/…/…/CREDITS.php%00
will execute the CREDITS.php
Addional attack-vectors:
CBE offers a file-upload function for uploading user profile images. The
uploaded file is not checked for beeing well-formed, it only needs to
have the right mime-type and maybe (depends on profile-picture
configuration) the right size, so we can embed php-code in the
profile-picture. Lets say we have registered an account on the site with
the user-id 23, then we can execute the backdoor by requesting:
index.php?option=com_cbe&task=userProfile&user=23&ajaxdirekt=true&tabname=…/…/…/images/cbe/23.gif%00
As we stay in the documents-root, we dont even have to worry about
safe-mode directory restrictions, and using GIFs will bypass most of
CBE's image pre-processing functions during file upload (except file-
and image-size checks).
Solutions:
a) check if the contents of an uploaded file contains a php open-tag
('<?php') (requires that the php-short-open-tag option is disabled)
b) Joomla offers several functions for accessing POST and GET params, i
guess using getWord() instead of getVar() would be a better choice in
this case.
History:
04.10.2010 - vendor informed
07.10.2010 - vendor released fixed version
08.10.2010 - public disclosure
Cheers
Delf Tonder