[NEWS] Safari XMLHttpRequest HTTP Header Injection

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Safari XMLHttpRequest HTTP Header Injection
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SUMMARY

The XMLHttpRequest object is intended to enforce a same-origin security
policy, and to prevent the injection of HTTP headers that can be used
maliciously. Unpatched releases of Safari on both Windows and MacOS X
allow JavaScript to bypass these restrictions. It is possible to insert
arbitrary HTTP headers into the request, including the Host header.

Apple has released APPLE-SA-2007-06-22 Security Update 2007-006, and
APPLE-SA-2007-06-22 Safari 3 Beta Update 3.0.2 which address this issue.

DETAILS

It is possible to bypass the security restrictions of the XMLHttpRequest
setRequestHeader function to include arbitrary headers by specifying
values containing newline characters. For example, a request such as this
is treated as valid:
xmlhttp.setRequestHeader('Foo', 'baa\nHost: test\n');

and results in:
GET / HTTP/1.1
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Accept-Language: en
Foo: baa
Host: test

Impact:
This allows a malicious site to cause the user's browser to attack other
sites that are virtual servers on the same IP address (eg. via SQL
injection or cross-site scripting). Potentially any header can be
injected. If the user is accessing the web via a proxy then potentially
any site can be attacked.

Timeline:
14/06/2007 - Apple informed of the vulnerability
22/06/2007 - Patch released
25/06/2007 - Confirmed that the fix addresses the issue
25/06/2007 - Westpoint advisory release

CVE Information:
<http://www.cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2007-2401>
CVE-2007-2401

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

The information has been provided by <mailto:rich@westpoint.ltd.uk>
Richard Moore.
The original article can be found at:
<http://www.westpoint.ltd.uk/advisories/wp-07-0002.txt>

http://www.westpoint.ltd.uk/advisories/wp-07-0002.txt

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