Warning: Researcher Drops phpMyAdmin Zero-Day Affecting All Versions

Sep 18, 2019

A cybersecurity researcher recently published details and
proof-of-concept for an unpatched zero-day vulnerability in
phpMyAdmin—one of the most popular applications for managing the
MySQL and MariaDB databases.

phpMyAdmin is a free and open source administration tool for
MySQL and MariaDB that’s widely used to manage the database for
websites created with WordPress, Joomla, and many other content
management platforms.

Discovered by security researcher and pentester Manuel Garcia
Cardenas, the vulnerability claims to be a cross-site request
forgery (CSRF) flaw, also known as XSRF, a well-known attack
wherein attackers trick authenticated users into executing an
unwanted action.
^[1]

Identified as CVE-2019-12922,
the flaw has been given a medium rating because of its limited
scope that only allows an attacker to delete any server in the
Setup page of a phpMyAdmin victim by triggering a CSRF attack.

All an attacker needs to do is send a crafted URL to targeted
web administrators, who already have logged in to their phpMyAdmin
panel on the same browser, tricking them into unknowingly delete
(DROP) the entire server by simply clicking on it.

“The attacker can easily create a fake hyperlink containing the
request that wants to execute on behalf of the user, in this way
making possible a CSRF attack due to the wrong use of HTTP method,”
Cardenas explains in a
post ^[3] to the Full Disclosure
mailing list.

The vulnerability is trivial to exploit because other than knowing
the URL of a targeted server, an attacker doesn’t need to know the
name of the database server he wants to drop.

Proof of Concept Exploit Code

The vulnerability affects phpMyAdmin versions up to and
including 4.9.0.1, which is the latest version of the software at
the time of writing.

The security flaw also resides in phpMyAdmin 5.0.0-alpha1, which
was released in July 2019, Cardenas told The Hacker News.

Cardenas discovered this vulnerability back in June 2019, and also
responsibly reported it to the project maintainers.

However, after phpmyAdmin maintainers failed to patch the
vulnerability within 90 days of being notified, the researcher
decided to release the vulnerability details and PoC to the public
on 13 September.

To address this vulnerability, Cardenas recommended to
“implement in each call the validation of the token variable, as
already done in other phpMyAdmin requests,” as a solution.

Until the maintainers patch the vulnerability, website
administrators and hosting providers are highly recommended to
avoid clicking any suspicious links.

^[2]

References

^{^}
Manuel Garcia Cardenas
(twitter.com)
^{^}
CVE-2019-12922
(cve.mitre.org)
^{^}
explains in a post
(seclists.org)

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OWASP TOP !0

Injection. Injection flaws, such as SQL, NoSQL, OS, and LDAP injection, occur when untrusted data is sent to an interpreter as part of a command or query. The attacker’s hostile data can trick the interpreter into executing unintended commands or accessing data without proper authorization. Broken Authentication. Application functions related to authentication and session management are often implemented incorrectly, allowing attackers to compromise passwords, keys, or session tokens, or to exploit other implementation flaws to assume other users’ identities temporarily or permanently. Sensitive Data Exposure. Many web applications and APIs do not properly protect sensitive data, such as financial, healthcare, and PII. Attackers may steal or modify such weakly protected data to conduct credit card fraud, identity theft, or other crimes. Sensitive data may be compromised without extra protection, such as encryption at rest or in transit, and requires special precautions when exchanged with the browser. XML External Entities (XXE). Many older or poorly configured XML processors evaluate external entity references within XML documents. External entities can be used to disclose internal files using the file URI handler, internal file shares, internal port scanning, remote code execution, and denial of service attacks. Broken Access Control. Restrictions on what authenticated users are allowed to do are often not properly enforced. Attackers can exploit these flaws to access unauthorized functionality and/or data, such as access other users’ accounts, view sensitive files, modify other users’ data, change access rights, etc. Security Misconfiguration. Security misconfiguration is the most commonly seen issue. This is commonly a result of insecure default configurations, incomplete or ad hoc configurations, open cloud storage, misconfigured HTTP headers, and verbose error messages containing sensitive information. Not only must all operating systems, frameworks, libraries, and applications be securely configured, but they must be patched/upgraded in a timely fashion. Cross-Site Scripting XSS. XSS flaws occur whenever an application includes untrusted data in a new web page without proper validation or escaping, or updates an existing web page with user-supplied data using a browser API that can create HTML or JavaScript. XSS allows attackers to execute scripts in the victim’s browser which can hijack user sessions, deface web sites, or redirect the user to malicious sites. Insecure Deserialization. Insecure deserialization often leads to remote code execution. Even if deserialization flaws do not result in remote code execution, they can be used to perform attacks, including replay attacks, injection attacks, and privilege escalation attacks. Using Components with Known Vulnerabilities. Components, such as libraries, frameworks, and other software modules, run with the same privileges as the application. If a vulnerable component is exploited, such an attack can facilitate serious data loss or server takeover. Applications and APIs using components with known vulnerabilities may undermine application defenses and enable various attacks and impacts. Insufficient Logging & Monitoring. Insufficient logging and monitoring, coupled with missing or ineffective integration with incident response, allows attackers to further attack systems, maintain persistence, pivot to more systems, and tamper, extract, or destroy data. Most breach studies show time to detect a breach is over 200 days, typically detected by external parties rather than internal processes or monitoring.

Warning: Researcher Drops phpMyAdmin Zero-Day Affecting All Versions

Proof of Concept Exploit Code

References

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