Elgg Cross-Site Scripting and Security Bypass Vulnerabilities


Description   A security issue and two vulnerabilities have been reported in Elgg, which can be exploited by malicious users to bypass certain security restrictions and by malicious people to bypass certain security restrictions and conduct cross-site scripting attacks.
1) Input passed to the "view" parameter in index.php (when "search" is set) is not properly sanitised before being returned to the user. This can be exploited to execute arbitrary HTML and script code in a user's browser session in context of an affected site.
2) An error when processing user registration requests can be exploited to bypass account validation.
3) An error when caching access permissions for a user can be exploited to gain unauthorized access to private entities.
Successful exploitation of this vulnerability requires that no plugin is enabled which calls an entity getter in its init function.
The security issue and vulnerabilities are reported in version 1.8.4. Prior versions may also be affected.
     
Vulnerable Products   Vulnerable Software:
Elgg 1.x
     
Solution   Update to version 1.8.5.
     
CVE  
     
References   http://blog.elgg.org/pg/blog/evan/read/209/elgg-185-released
     
Vulnerability Manager Detection   No
     
IPS Protection  
ASQ Engine alarm Available Since
XSS - Prevention - GET : suspicious 'iframe' tag found in URL
3.2.0
XSS - Prevention - GET : suspicious 'meta' tag found in URL
3.2.0
XSS - Prevention - GET : suspicious tag with event found in URL
3.2.0
XSS - Prevention - GET : suspicious 'applet' tag found in URL
3.2.0
XSS - Phishing : suspicious 'div' tag found in URL
3.2.0
XSS - Prevention - GET : suspicious 'style' attribute found in URL
3.2.0
XSS - Prevention - GET : suspicious 'img' tag found in URL
3.2.0
XSS - Phishing : suspicious 'a' tag found in URL
3.2.0
XSS - Prevention - GET : cookie access attempt using script language found in URL
3.2.0
XSS - Prevention - GET : suspicious 'embed' tag found in URL
3.2.0
XSS - Prevention - GET : suspicious 'object' tag found in URL
3.2.0
XSS - Phishing : suspicious 'form' tag found in URL
3.2.0
XSS - Prevention - GET : javascript code found in URL
3.2.0
XSS - Prevention - GET : evasion attempt using tag characters encoding in URL
3.2.0
XSS - Prevention - GET : suspicious 'style' tag found in URL
3.2.0
XSS - Phishing : suspicious 'link' tag found in URL
3.2.0
XSS - Prevention - GET : 'script' tag found in URL
3.2.0
XSS - Prevention - GET : 'location' javascript object found in URL
3.2.0
XSS - Prevention - GET : suspicious 'div' tag found in URL
3.2.0
     


 
 
 
 
 Risk level 
Low 

 Vulnerability First Public Report Date 
2012-05-21 

 Target Type 
Server 

 Possible exploit 
Remote