Joomla: Session hijacking vulnerability, CVE-2008-4122 References http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2008-4122 http://int21.de/cve/CVE-2008-4122-joomla.html http://enablesecurity.com/2008/08/11/surf-jack-https-will-not-save-you/ https://www.defcon.org/html/defcon-16/dc-16-speakers.html#Perry Description When configuring a web application to use only ssl (e. g. by forwarding all http-requests to https), a user would expect that sniffing and hijacking the session is impossible. Though, for this to be secure, one needs to set the session cookie to have the secure flag. Else the cookie will be transferred through http if the victim's browser does a single http-request on the same domain. Joomla 1.5.8 does not set that flag. I've contacted the Joomla security team in advance but got no reply. Disclosure Timeline 2008-11-18: Vendor contacted 2008-12-16 Published advisory Credits and copyright This vulnerability was discovered by Hanno Boeck of schokokeks.org webhosting. It's licensed under the creative commons attribution license. Hanno Boeck, http://www.hboeck.de -- Hanno Boeck Blog: http://www.hboeck.de/ GPG: 3DBD3B20