[HACKATTACK Advisory 20081016]WEB//NEWS SQL Injection and Cookie Manipulation

Details

Product: WEB//NEWS
Security-Risk: high
Remote-Exploit: yes
Vendor-URL: http://www.stylemotion.de/
Vendor-Status: informed
Advisory-Status: published

Credits

Discovered by: David Vieira-Kurz
http://www.HACKATTACK.at / www.HACKATTACK.eu

Affected Products:

WEB//NEWS 1.4 and prior

Original Advisory:

http://www.HACKATTACK.at/

Introduction

WEB//NEWS is an easy to handle news management system which works with MySQL/PHP.

More Details

1. SQL Injection:

---

Input passed to the "catid" parameter in "search.php" using $_POST is not properly sanitised before being used in a SQL
query.
This can be exploited to manipulate SQL queries by injecting arbitrary SQL code.

2. Cookie_Manipulation:

---

After a successfull sql injection and getting the required administrator password hash, an attacker is able to bypass the
login with the given information and to gain full administrative access on the news management system.

1.1 PoC:

http://localhost/webnews/search.php?

Postdata:

1. an attacker have to input a keyword into the keyword textfield. This is required for successfull exploitation.

2. An attacker will post the follwing sql statement to categorie id field:

') union select 1,2,3,4,5,password,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19 from wn_user where userid=1/**

Solution

Fix

Upgrade to newest version(1.4.1a)

Solution

Edit the source code to ensure that input is properly sanitised.
You should work with "htmlspecialchars()" or "htmlentities()" php-function to ensure that html tags
are not going to be executed. You should also work with the "mysql_real_escape_string()" or "addslashes()" php-function to
ensure that sql statements
can't be delivered over the "get" variables. Further it is recommend to set off the "register globals" option in the
"php.ini" on your webserver. It's also possible to turn on magic_quotes.

Example:
$password = htmlentities($_POST['catid']);
$file = htmlspecialchars($_GET['keyword']);
$id = intval($_POST['id']);
?>

History/Timeline

22.09.2008 discovery of the vulnerabilities
22.09.2008 additional tests with other versions
24.09.2008 contacted the vendor
15.10.2008 advisory is written
16.10.2008 advisory released

HACKATTACK

HACKATTACK IT SECURITY GmbH is an Austrian Penetrationtest and security Assesement company which focuses
on web application security and firewall security.
You can find more Information about HACKATTACK at
http://www.HACKATTACK.at