SQL-Injections in Mapbender

During a penetration test RedTeam Pentesting discovered multiple SQL-Injections in Mapbender. A remote attacker is able to execute arbitrary SQL commands and therefore can get e.g. valid usernames and password hashes of the Mapbender users.

Details

• Product: Mapbender
• Affected Versions: 2.4.4 (verified), probably older versions, too
• Fixed Versions: 2.4.5 rc1
• Vulnerability Type: SQL-Injection
• Security-Risk: high
• Vendor-URL: http://www.mapbender.org
• Vendor-Status: informed, fixed version released
• Advisory-URL: https://www.redteam-pentesting.de/advisories/rt-sa-2008-002
• Advisory-Status: public
• CVE: CVE-2008-0301
• CVE-URL: https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2008-0301

Introduction

“Mapbender is the software and portal site for geodata management of OGC OWS architectures. The software provides web technology for managing spatial data services implemented in PHP, JavaScript and XML. It provides a data model and interfaces for displaying, navigating and querying OGC compliant map services. The Mapbender framework furthermore provides authentication and authorization services, OWS proxy functionality, management interfaces for user, group and service administration in WebGIS projects.”

(from the vendor’s homepage)

More Details

Due to the lack of input validation, an attacker is able to inject SQL-commands in many PHP scripts of Mapbender. This vulnerability can be exploited regardless of PHP magic quotes. For demonstration purposes, the injection into the “gaz” variable of the file http/php/mod_gazetteer_edit.php is shown.

The two relevant lines are:

$sql = "SELECT * FROM gazetteer WHERE gazetteer_id = ".$_REQUEST["gaz"];
$res = db_query($sql);

The user input $_REQUEST[“gaz”] goes unfiltered, unquoted and unescaped into an SQL statement. As no prepared statements are used here, an attacker can execute arbitrary SQL commands.

There is no need to use quotes in the SQL statement for an attacker, so PHP magic quotes do not help.

Proof of Concept

The following request retrieves the first username and password hash from the Mapbender database.

http://www.example.com/php/mod_gazetteer_edit.php?gaz= 1 LIMIT 0 UNION 
    (SELECT char(65), char(65), char(65), char(65), char(65), char(65),
    mb_user_name, char(65), mb_user_password, char(65) from mb_user
    LIMIT 0,1)

Workaround

None.

Fix

The vulnerability is fixed in release 2.4.5 rc1.

Security Risk

As an attacker is able to e.g. get the password hashes of the administrators and other users, the risk is estimated as high.

History

• 2007-12-14 Problem identified during a penetration test
• 2008-01-09 Customer approves contacting of Mapbender developers
• 2008-01-17 CVE number assigned
• 2008-03-10 Vendor releases fixed version
• 2008-03-11 Advisory released
• 2009-05-08 Updated Advisory URL

RedTeam Pentesting GmbH

RedTeam Pentesting offers individual penetration tests, short pentests, performed by a team of specialised IT-security experts. Hereby, security weaknesses in company networks or products are uncovered and can be fixed immediately.

As there are only few experts in this field, RedTeam Pentesting wants to share its knowledge and enhance the public knowledge with research in security-related areas. The results are made available as public security advisories.

More information about RedTeam Pentesting can be found at https://www.redteam-pentesting.de.