Security

Currently, there’s a lot of hype around the behavior of Python’s tarfile module for extracting archives. In short: tarfile will not sanitize filenames in archives to prevent directory traversal attacks. For example, creating an archive and adding a file with a leading ../ will make the extract* methods create that file in a directory above the current one. This way (or by using an absolute path starting with /), a file can be written to an arbitrary location (given that the user executing the code has the according write privileges). ...

I recently came across an nginx server that had a vulnerable alias configuration which allowed anyone to read files outside the intended directory. In the following post I will describe the misconfiguration and provide demo files so that you can experiment with it yourself. The general issue was originally highlighted a few years ago in a BlackHat presentation (Breaking Parser Logic!, Orange Tsai) and apparantly first shown even earlier. While the linked presentation only has a couple of slides on this particular issue it’s worth checking out in full. The docker setup Let’s say we have a PHP application that should be served through nginx. To quickly get things running we configure our setup via the following docker-compose.yml file: ...

Regular expressions are often used to check if a user input should be allowed for a specific action or lead to an error as it might be malicious. Let’s say we have the following regular expression that should guard the application from allowing any characters that could be used to execute code as part of a template injection: /^[0-9a-z]+$/ At first sight this looks OK: if we have a string containing only numbers and/or characters a-z we will match them and can continue. If we have other characters and are thus not matching this pattern, we can error out. Injecting something like abc<%=7*7%> or any other template injection pattern won’t work. Or will it? It depends… ...

Writing data to the output buffer before deciding that the response to the current HTTP request should actually be a redirect (for example when an unauthenticated user is not allowed to access some content) is an issue not exclusive to PHP but a relatively easy mistake to make in this environment. After not having been exposed to PHP in quite a while I recently did a security assessment of a PHP application again. During the test this exact issue popped up again, so I want to give a short description on how and why this can lead to information leaks. ...

A couple of months ago I looked more deeply into the “Import Records” functionality in FileMaker, especially the XML parsing, and was wondering if any XXE vulnerability may exist and how one could exploit this in technically interesting ways. The vulnerability is/was indeed there and can lead to local file disclosure and server side request forgery in various components of the FileMaker platform. The following is a description of the vulnerability including potential exploitation paths. ...