CVSTrac 2.0.0 Denial of Service (DoS) vulnerability

Advisory Content :

SECURITY ADVISORY
=================

Application: CVSTrac
Version: 2.0.0
Vulnerability: Denial of Service (DoS)
Identification: CVE-2007-0347
Date: 2007-01-29 12:00 UTC

DESCRIPTION
-----------

A Denial of Service (DoS) vulnerability exists in CVSTrac
(http://www.cvstrac.org/) version 2.0.0, a web-based bug and patch-set
tracking system for the version control systems CVS, Subversion and Git.

The vulnerability is in the Wiki-style text output formatter and is
triggered by special text constructs in commit messages, tickets and
Wiki pages. Only users with check-in permissions and Wiki or ticket edit
permissions can perform an attack. But as the anonymous user usually
is granted Wiki edit and ticket creation permissions, an attacker
remotely and anonymously can cause a partial DoS (depending on the pages
requested) on a CVSTrac installation by opening a new ticket or editing
a Wiki page with an arbitrary text containing for instance the string
"/foo/bar'quux".

The result of an attack is an error of the underlying SQLite RDBMS:

| Database Error
| db_exists: Database exists query failed
| SELECT filename FROM filechng WHERE filename='foo/bar'quux'
| Reason: near "quux": syntax error

ANALYSIS
--------

The DoS vulnerability exists because the is_eow() function in "format.c"
does NOT just check the first(!) character of the supplied string
for an End-Of-Word terminating character, but instead iterates over
string and this way can skip a single embedded quotation mark. The
is_repository_file() function then in turn assumes that the filename
string can never contain a single quotation mark and traps into an SQL
escaping problem.

An SQL injection via this technique is somewhat limited as is_eow()
bails on whitespace. So while one _can_ do an SQL injection, one is
limited to SQL queries containing only characters which get past the
function isspace(3). This effectively limits attacks to SQL commands
like "VACUUM".

WORKAROUND
----------

Administrators can quickly workaround by revoking permissions on the
users. Restoring those permissions, obviously, would require keeping
vulnerable permissions on at least one infrequently used account like
"setup" or using the CLI sqlite3(1) to manually add them back later.

One can resurrect an attacked CVSTrac 2.0.0 by fixing the texts in the
underlying SQLite database with the following small Perl script.

##
## cvstrack-resurrect.pl -- CVSTrac Post-Attack Database Resurrection
## Copyright (c) 2007 Ralf S. Engelschall <rse (at) engelschall (dot) com
[email concealed]>
##

use DBI; # requires OpenPKG perl-dbi
use DBD::SQLite; # requires OpenPKG perl-dbi,
perl-dbi::with_dbd_sqlite=yes
use DBIx::Simple; # requires OpenPKG perl-dbix
use Date::Format; # requires OpenPKG perl-time

my $db_file = $ARGV[0];

my $db = DBIx::Simple->connect(
"dbi:SQLite:dbname=$db_file", "", "",
{ RaiseError => 0, AutoCommit => 0 }
);

my $eow = q{x00s.,:;?!)"'};

sub fixup {
my ($data) = @_;
if ($$data =~ m:/[^$eow]*/[^$eow]*'[^$eow]+:s) {
$$data =~ s:(/[^$eow]*/[^$eow]*)('[^$eow]+):$1 $2:sg;
return 1;
}
return 0;
}

foreach my $rec ($db->query("SELECT name, invtime, text FROM
wiki")->hashes()) {
if (&fixup($rec->{"text"})) {
printf("++ adjusting Wiki page "%s" as of %sn",
$rec->{"name"}, time2str("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S",
-$rec->{"invtime"}));
$db->query("UPDATE wiki SET text = ? WHERE name = ? AND invtime =
?",
$rec->{"text"}, $rec->{"name"}, $rec->{"invtime"});
}
}
foreach my $rec ($db->query("SELECT tn, description, remarks FROM
ticket")->hashes()) {
if (&fixup($rec->{"description"}) or &fixup($rec->{"remarks"})) {
printf("++ adjusting ticket #%dn",
$rec->{"tn"});
$db->query("UPDATE ticket SET description = ?, remarks = ? WHERE tn
= ?",
$rec->{"description"}, $rec->{"remarks"}, $rec->{"tn"});
}
}
foreach my $rec ($db->query("SELECT tn, chngtime, oldval, newval FROM
tktchng")->hashes()) {
if (&fixup($rec->{"oldval"}) or &fixup($rec->{"newval"})) {
printf("++ adjusting ticket [%d] change as of %sn",
$rec->{"tn"}, time2str("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S",
$rec->{"chngtime"}));
$db->query("UPDATE tktchng SET oldval = ?, newval = ? WHERE tn = ?
AND chngtime = ?",
$rec->{"oldval"}, $rec->{"newval"}, $rec->{"tn"},
$rec->{"chngtime"});
}
}
foreach my $rec ($db->query("SELECT cn, message FROM chng")->hashes()) {
if (&fixup($rec->{"message"})) {
printf("++ adjusting change [%d]n",
$rec->{"cn"});
$db->query("UPDATE chng SET message = ? WHERE cn = ?",
$rec->{"message"}, $rec->{"cn"});
}
}

$db->commit();
$db->disconnect();

RESOLUTION
----------

Upgrade to the now available CVSTrac 2.0.1:
http://www.cvstrac.org/cvstrac-2.0.1.tar.gz

Or apply the following upstream vendor patch against CVSTrac 2.0.0:
http://www.cvstrac.org/cvstrac/chngview?cn=852

Index: cvstrac/format.c
--- format.c 2006/07/05 01:06:50 1.87
+++ format.c 2006/08/16 23:02:14 1.88
@@ -77,6 +77,8 @@
** Return TRUE if *z points to the terminator for a word. Words
** are terminated by whitespace or end of input or any of the
** characters in zEnd.
+** Note that is_eow() ignores zEnd characters _inside_ a word. They
+** only count if they're followed by other EOW characters.
*/
int is_eow(const char *z, const char *zEnd){
if( zEnd==0 ) zEnd = ".,:;?!)"'";
@@ -123,6 +125,7 @@
** somewhere inside. Spaces in filenames aren't supported.
*/
int is_repository_file(const char *z){
+ char *s;
int i;
int gotslash=0;
if( z[0]!='/' ) return 0;
@@ -132,13 +135,12 @@
if(!gotslash) return 0;

/* see if it's in the repository. Note that we strip the leading '/' from
the
- * query. Note that the is_eow() check means there's no ' character.
+ * query.
*/
- if( !db_exists("SELECT filename FROM filechng WHERE filename='%.*s'",
- i-1, &z[1]) ){
- return 0;
- }
- return i;
+ s = mprintf("%.*s", i-1, &z[1]);
+ gotslash = db_exists("SELECT filename FROM filechng WHERE
filename='%q'", s );
+ free(s);
+ return gotslash ? i : 0;
}

/*

HISTORY
-------

2007-01-17 10:00 UTC: problem detected
2007-01-17 11:30 UTC: vulnerability detected in format.c:is_eow()
2007-01-17 12:15 UTC: vulnerability analized and first workaround patch
created
2007-01-17 12:45 UTC: database resurrection script written
2007-01-17 13:00 UTC: upstream vendor notified
2007-01-17 22:24 UTC: vendor confirmed vulnerability and provided official
fix
2007-01-18 09:22 UTC: vendor informed and CVE number requested from MITRE
2007-01-18 20:08 UTC: received CVE number CVE-2007-0347 from MITRE
2007-01-22 08:30 UTC: settled with vendor on an embargo date of 2007-01-29
12:00 UTC
2007-01-22 09:00 UTC: pre-informed "vendor-sec"
2007-01-29 12:00 UTC: send out RSE security advisory

Ralf S. Engelschall
rse (at) engelschall (dot) com
[email concealed]
www.engelschall.com

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CVSTrac 2.0.0 Denial of Service (DoS) vulnerability