[MajorSecurity Advisory #59]PHP <=5.3 - mysqli_real_escape_string() full
path disclosure

Details

Product: PHP <=5.3
Security-Risk: low
Remote-Exploit: yes
Vendor-URL: http://www.php.net/
Vendor-Status: informed
Advisory-Status: published

Credits

Discovered by: David Vieira-Kurz
http://www.majorsecurity.info

Affected Products:

PHP 5.3 and prior
PHP 5.2.11 and prior

Original Advisory:

http://www.majorsecurity.info/index_2.php?major_rls=major_rls59

Introduction

"PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is
especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML."

• from php.net

More Details

1. Full Path Disclosure

---

There is a full path disclosure vulnerability concerning the
mysqli_real_escape_string() php function which allow attackers to
gather the real path of the server side script.

The mysqli_real_escape_string() PHP function takes strings as parameters
and will raise warnings when values that are passed are arrays rather
then strings.
To get the path of the current script, you simply need to pass the
arguments as arrays rather then expected strings
and then simply read the warning message generated by PHP to see the
error including the full path of the current running script.

Proof of concept:
http://localhost/cms/sqlfilter/sqlsanatizer.php?params[]=

Warning: mysqli_real_escape_string() expects parameter 1 to be string,
array given in /var/www/vhosts/cms/sqlfilter/sqlsanatizer.php

Solution

I would NOT recommend to just react by "security through obscurity" and
turn off the error messages, error reporting etc.
This is not a solution because there are a lot of users that are having
a shared hosting server where they aren't able to manipulate
the "php.ini" configuration file - even ini_set() is forbidden on some
shared hoster servers.
So they still would have the full path disclosure there.

So, what's the workaround then ?

Workaround

I would recommend to meticulously go through the code forcing PHP to
cast the data to the desired type, in this case the (string) casts
to eliminate the Notice or Warning messages.

Example:
<?PHP
if(isset($_GET['user'])) {
if (is_array($user = $_GET['user'])) {

      $casted = (string)$user;
     // next steps
      ...
  } else {
         $query = sprintf("SELECT * FROM users WHERE user='%s'",
         mysqli_real_escape_string($user),
    }

}
?>

MajorSecurity

MajorSecurity is a German penetrationtesting and security research
company which focuses
on web application security. We offer professional penetrationtestings,
security audits,
source code reviews and reliable proof of concepts.
You will find more Information about MajorSecurity at
http://www.majorsecurity.info/