CVE-2018-16232 - Improper Neutralization of Special Elements used in an OS Command ('OS Command Injection')

Severity

88%

Complexity

27%

Confidentiality

98%

An authenticated command injection vulnerability exists in IPFire Firewall before 2.21 Core Update 124 in backup.cgi. This allows an authenticated user with privileges for the affected page to execute arbitrary commands.

An authenticated command injection vulnerability exists in IPFire Firewall before 2.21 Core Update 124 in backup.cgi. This allows an authenticated user with privileges for the affected page to execute arbitrary commands.

CVSS 3.1 Base Score 8.8. CVSS Attack Vector: network. CVSS Attack Complexity: low. CVSS Vector: (CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H).

CVSS 2.0 Base Score 6.5. CVSS Attack Vector: network. CVSS Attack Complexity: low. CVSS Vector: (AV:N/AC:L/Au:S/C:P/I:P/A:P).

Demo Examples

Improper Neutralization of Special Elements used in an OS Command ('OS Command Injection')

CWE-78

This example code intends to take the name of a user and list the contents of that user's home directory. It is subject to the first variant of OS command injection.


               
system($command);

The $userName variable is not checked for malicious input. An attacker could set the $userName variable to an arbitrary OS command such as:


               
;rm -rf /

Which would result in $command being:


               
ls -l /home/;rm -rf /

Since the semi-colon is a command separator in Unix, the OS would first execute the ls command, then the rm command, deleting the entire file system.

Also note that this example code is vulnerable to Path Traversal (CWE-22) and Untrusted Search Path (CWE-426) attacks.

Improper Neutralization of Special Elements used in an OS Command ('OS Command Injection')

CWE-78

This example is a web application that intends to perform a DNS lookup of a user-supplied domain name. It is subject to the first variant of OS command injection.


               
}
close($fh);
print "<br>\n";

Suppose an attacker provides a domain name like this:


               
cwe.mitre.org%20%3B%20/bin/ls%20-l

The "%3B" sequence decodes to the ";" character, and the %20 decodes to a space. The open() statement would then process a string like this:


               
/path/to/nslookup cwe.mitre.org ; /bin/ls -l

As a result, the attacker executes the "/bin/ls -l" command and gets a list of all the files in the program's working directory. The input could be replaced with much more dangerous commands, such as installing a malicious program on the server.

Improper Neutralization of Special Elements used in an OS Command ('OS Command Injection')

CWE-78

The example below reads the name of a shell script to execute from the system properties. It is subject to the second variant of OS command injection.


               
System.exec(script);

If an attacker has control over this property, then they could modify the property to point to a dangerous program.

Improper Neutralization of Special Elements used in an OS Command ('OS Command Injection')

CWE-78

In the example below, a method is used to transform geographic coordinates from latitude and longitude format to UTM format. The method gets the input coordinates from a user through a HTTP request and executes a program local to the application server that performs the transformation. The method passes the latitude and longitude coordinates as a command-line option to the external program and will perform some processing to retrieve the results of the transformation and return the resulting UTM coordinates.


               
}
return utmCoords;
// process results of coordinate transform// ...

However, the method does not verify that the contents of the coordinates input parameter includes only correctly-formatted latitude and longitude coordinates. If the input coordinates were not validated prior to the call to this method, a malicious user could execute another program local to the application server by appending '&' followed by the command for another program to the end of the coordinate string. The '&' instructs the Windows operating system to execute another program.

Improper Neutralization of Special Elements used in an OS Command ('OS Command Injection')

CWE-78

The following code is from an administrative web application designed to allow users to kick off a backup of an Oracle database using a batch-file wrapper around the rman utility and then run a cleanup.bat script to delete some temporary files. The script rmanDB.bat accepts a single command line parameter, which specifies what type of backup to perform. Because access to the database is restricted, the application runs the backup as a privileged user.


               
...
"&&c:\\utl\\cleanup.bat\"")

The problem here is that the program does not do any validation on the backuptype parameter read from the user. Typically the Runtime.exec() function will not execute multiple commands, but in this case the program first runs the cmd.exe shell in order to run multiple commands with a single call to Runtime.exec(). Once the shell is invoked, it will happily execute multiple commands separated by two ampersands. If an attacker passes a string of the form "& del c:\\dbms\\*.*", then the application will execute this command along with the others specified by the program. Because of the nature of the application, it runs with the privileges necessary to interact with the database, which means whatever command the attacker injects will run with those privileges as well.

Overview

Type

IPFire

First reported 6 years ago

2018-10-17 14:29:00

Last updated 5 years ago

2019-10-03 00:03:00

Affected Software

IPFire 1.49

1.49

IPFire 2.1

2.1

IPFire 2.1 Core Update 16

2.1

IPFire 2.11 Core Update 53

2.11

IPFire 2.11 Core Update 54

2.11

IPFire 2.11 Core Update 59

2.11

IPFire 2.11 Core Update 60

2.11

IPFire 2.11 Core Update 62

2.11

IPFire 2.11 Core Update 64

2.11

IPFire 2.13 Core Update 66

2.13

IPFire 2.13 Core Update 67

2.13

IPFire 2.13 Core Update 71

2.13

IPFire 2.13 Core Update 72

2.13

IPFire 2.13 Core Update 73

2.13

IPFire 2.13 Core Update 74

2.13

IPFire 2.13 Core Update 75

2.13

IPFire 2.13 Core Update 76

2.13

IPFire 2.13 Release Candidate 1

2.13

IPFire 2.13 Release Candidate 2

2.13

IPFire 2.15 76 Release Candidate 1

2.15

IPFire 2.15 77 Release Candidate 1

2.15

IPFire 2.15 77 Release Candidate 2

2.15

IPFire 2.15 Core Update 79

2.15

IPFire 2.15 Core Update 81

2.15

IPFire 2.15 Core Update 82

2.15

IPFire 2.15 Core Update 83

2.15

IPFire 2.15 Core Update 84

2.15

IPFire 2.15 Core Update 85

2.15

IPFire 2.17 86 Beta 1

2.17

IPFire 2.17 87 Release Candidate 1

2.17

IPFire 2.17 Core Update 88

2.17

IPFire 2.17 Core Update 89

2.17

IPFire 2.17 Core Update 91

2.17

IPFire 2.17 Core Update 93

2.17

IPFire 2.17 Core Update 95

2.17

IPFire 2.17 Core Update 97

2.17

IPFire 2.17 Core Update 98

2.17

IPFire 2.17 Core Update 99

2.17

IPFire 2.19 Core Update 100

2.19

IPFire 2.19 Core Update 101

2.19

IPFire 2.19 Core Update 102

2.19

IPFire 2.19 Core Update 105

2.19

IPFire 2.19 Core Update 106

2.19

IPFire 2.19 Core Update 107

2.19

IPFire 2.19 Core Update 108

2.19

IPFire 2.19 Core Update 111

2.19

IPFire 2.19 Core Update 112

2.19

IPFire 2.19 Core Update 113

2.19

IPFire 2.19 Core Update 114

2.19

IPFire 2.19 Core Update 116

2.19

IPFire 2.19 Core Update 117

2.19

IPFire 2.19 Core Update 118

2.19

IPFire 2.19 Core Update 119

2.19

IPFire 2.19 Core Update 120

2.19

IPFire 2.21 Core Update 122

2.21

IPFire 2.21 Core Update 123

2.21

Stay updated

ExploitPedia is constantly evolving. Sign up to receive a notification when we release additional functionality.

Get in touch

If you'd like to report a bug or have any suggestions for improvements then please do get in touch with us using this form. We will get back to you as soon as we can.