[dev] Fwd: IMP 2.x SQL injection vulnerabilities

[Eric Rostetter]

FYI, in case you aren't on bugtraq...

Eric

----- Forwarded message from jouko at solutions.fi -----
    Date: Wed, 8 Jan 2003 19:34:16 +0200 (EET)
    From: Jouko Pynnonen <jouko at solutions.fi>
Reply-To: Jouko Pynnonen <jouko at solutions.fi>
 Subject: IMP 2.x SQL injection vulnerabilities
      To: bugtraq at securityfocus.com



IMP is a popular webmail package written in PHP. It ships with some UNIX 
systems and is also used on Windows servers. The version 2 of the program 
contains some SQL injection flaws which allow any remote user to access 
the webmail system's database. Valid user authentication is not required 
in order to exploit the flaws.

The error happens in some database functions in PHP files named 
lib/db.<databasename>. An example from db.pgsql, function check_prefs:

  $sql="select username from $default->db_pref_table where
username='$user@$server'";

Including user-supplied strings directly in an SQL query is a mistake. 
The fix is to use something like the addslashes() PHP function.

As a proof of concept:

$ lynx
"http://webmail.server/imp/mailbox.php3?actionID=6&server=x&imapuser=x';somesql+--&pass=x"

IMP would try to execute "somesql" and the result would be this kind 
of PHP error (presuming the PHP configuration allows displaying error 
messages on web pages):

   Warning:  PostgreSQL  query  failed:  ERROR:  parser: parse error at or near
"somesql" in
   /usr/share/horde/imp/lib/db.pgsql on line 127

Even though SQL query results aren't directly readable from the screen 
in the above example, the attacker might e.g. update his/her mail 
signature to contain wanted query results and then view it on the 
preferences page of IMP. This requires a valid login, but isn't a 
problem for an attacker because IMP allows the use of any remote IMAP 
server. Use of the server_list option doesn't affect this behaviour; the 
attacker-controlled IMAP server may be still passed to mailbox.php3 in the 
URL.

The impact of SQL injection depends heavily on the underlying database 
and its configuration. If PostgreSQL is used, it's possible to execute 
multiple complete SQL queries separated by semicolons. The database 
contains session id's so the attacker might hijack sessions of people 
currently logged in and read their mail. In the worst case, if the 
hordemgr user has the required privilege to use the COPY SQL command 
(found in PostgreSQL at least), a remote user may read or write to any 
file the database user (postgres) can. The attacker may then be able to 
run arbitrary shell commands by writing them to the postgres user's 
~/.psqlrc; they'd be run when the user starts the psql command which 
under some configurations happens regularly from a cron script.

If other database servers are used, the exploitation possibilities may 
be more limited.

The vendor has been informed about this bug last month. Although there 
hasn't been any direct reply, there was a comment on this on the IMP 
mailing list: "2.2.x is officially deprecated/unsupported. This does not 
apply to 3.x.".

Versions up to and including 2.2.8 seem vulnerable. According to the 
author, version 3 isn't affected so upgrading to IMP 3 is recommended. 
This, and more information about IMP is available at http://horde.org/imp/.



  Jouko Pynnönen
  jouko at solutions.fi


----- End forwarded message -----


-- 
Eric Rostetter
The Department of Physics
The University of Texas at Austin

Why get even? Get odd!