Debian DSA-2246-1 : mahara - several vulnerabilities

medium Nessus Plugin ID 55034

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Synopsis

The remote Debian host is missing a security-related update.

Description

Several vulnerabilities were discovered in Mahara, an electronic portfolio, weblog, and resume builder. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project identifies the following problems :

- CVE-2011-1402 It was discovered that previous versions of Mahara did not check user credentials before adding a secret URL to a view or suspending a user.

- CVE-2011-1403 Due to a misconfiguration of the Pieform package in Mahara, the cross-site request forgery protection mechanism that Mahara relies on to harden its form was not working and was essentially disabled. This is a critical vulnerability which could allow attackers to trick other users (for example administrators) into performing malicious actions on behalf of the attacker.
Most Mahara forms are vulnerable.

- CVE-2011-1404 Many of the JSON structures returned by Mahara for its AJAX interactions included more information than what ought to be disclosed to the logged in user. New versions of Mahara limit this information to what is necessary for each page.

- CVE-2011-1405 Previous versions of Mahara did not escape the contents of HTML emails sent to users. Depending on the filters enabled in one's mail reader, it could lead to cross-site scripting attacks.

- CVE-2011-1406 It has been pointed out to us that if Mahara is configured (through its wwwroot variable) to use HTTPS, it will happily let users login via the HTTP version of the site if the web server is configured to serve content over both protocol. The new version of Mahara will, when the wwwroot points to an HTTPS URL, automatically redirect to HTTPS if it detects that it is being run over HTTP.

We recommend that sites wanting to run Mahara over HTTPS make sure that their web server configuration does not allow the serving of content over HTTP and merely redirects to the secure version. We also suggest that site administrators consider adding the HSTS headers to their web server configuration.

Solution

Upgrade the mahara packages.

For the oldstable distribution (lenny), these problems have been fixed in version 1.0.4-4+lenny10.

For the stable distribution (squeeze), these problems have been fixed in version 1.2.6-2+squeeze2.

Plugin Details

Severity: Medium

ID: 55034

File Name: debian_DSA-2246.nasl

Version: 1.13

Type: local

Agent: unix

Family: Debian Local Security Checks

Published: 6/10/2011

Updated: 1/4/2021

Supported Sensors: Frictionless Assessment Agent, Nessus Agent, Agentless Assessment, Nessus

Risk Information

VPR

Risk Factor: Medium

Score: 5.9

CVSS v2

Risk Factor: Medium

Base Score: 6.8

Temporal Score: 5

Vector: CVSS2#AV:N/AC:M/Au:N/C:P/I:P/A:P

Vulnerability Information

CPE: p-cpe:/a:debian:debian_linux:mahara, cpe:/o:debian:debian_linux:5.0, cpe:/o:debian:debian_linux:6.0

Required KB Items: Host/local_checks_enabled, Host/Debian/release, Host/Debian/dpkg-l

Exploit Ease: No known exploits are available

Patch Publication Date: 5/29/2011

Reference Information

CVE: CVE-2011-1402, CVE-2011-1403, CVE-2011-1404, CVE-2011-1405, CVE-2011-1406

BID: 47798

DSA: 2246

Detections

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