CVE-2019-1915

A vulnerability in the web-based interface of Cisco Unified Communications Manager, Cisco Unified Communications Manager Session Management Edition (SME), Cisco Unified Communications Manager IM and Presence (Unified CM IM&P) Service, and Cisco Unity Connection could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to conduct a cross-site request forgery (CSRF) attack on an affected system. The vulnerability is due to insufficient CSRF protections by the affected software. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by persuading a targeted user to click a malicious link. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to send arbitrary requests that could change the password of a targeted user. An attacker could then take unauthorized actions on behalf of the targeted user.

Weakness

The web application does not, or cannot, sufficiently verify whether a request was intentionally provided by the user who sent the request, which could have originated from an unauthorized actor.

Affected Software

Potential Mitigations

• Use a vetted library or framework that does not allow this weakness to occur or provides constructs that make this weakness easier to avoid [REF-1482].
• For example, use anti-CSRF packages such as the OWASP CSRFGuard. [REF-330]
• Another example is the ESAPI Session Management control, which includes a component for CSRF. [REF-45]
• Use the “double-submitted cookie” method as described by Felten and Zeller:
• When a user visits a site, the site should generate a pseudorandom value and set it as a cookie on the user’s machine. The site should require every form submission to include this value as a form value and also as a cookie value. When a POST request is sent to the site, the request should only be considered valid if the form value and the cookie value are the same.
• Because of the same-origin policy, an attacker cannot read or modify the value stored in the cookie. To successfully submit a form on behalf of the user, the attacker would have to correctly guess the pseudorandom value. If the pseudorandom value is cryptographically strong, this will be prohibitively difficult.
• This technique requires Javascript, so it may not work for browsers that have Javascript disabled. [REF-331]

Related Attack Patterns

• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/111.html
• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/462.html
• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/467.html
• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/62.html

References

• https://tools.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-20191002-cucm-csrf
• https://tools.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-20191002-cucm-csrf