CVE Vulnerabilities

CVE-2020-5301

Exposure of Sensitive Information to an Unauthorized Actor

Published: Apr 21, 2020 | Modified: Nov 21, 2024
CVSS 3.x
3.1
LOW
Source:
NVD
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:N/A:N
CVSS 2.x
3.5 LOW
AV:N/AC:M/Au:S/C:P/I:N/A:N
RedHat/V2
RedHat/V3
Ubuntu
MEDIUM

SimpleSAMLphp versions before 1.18.6 contain an information disclosure vulnerability. The module controller in SimpleSAMLModule that processes requests for pages hosted by modules, has code to identify paths ending with .php and process those as PHP code. If no other suitable way of handling the given path exists it presents the file to the browser. The check to identify paths ending with .php does not account for uppercase letters. If someone requests a path ending with e.g. .PHP and the server is serving the code from a case-insensitive file system, such as on Windows, the processing of the PHP code does not occur, and the source code is instead presented to the browser. An attacker may use this issue to gain access to the source code in third-party modules that is meant to be private, or even sensitive. However, the attack surface is considered small, as the attack will only work when SimpleSAMLphp serves such content from a file system that is not case-sensitive, such as on Windows. This issue is fixed in version 1.18.6.

Weakness

The product exposes sensitive information to an actor that is not explicitly authorized to have access to that information.

Affected Software

Name Vendor Start Version End Version
Simplesamlphp Simplesamlphp * 1.18.6 (excluding)
Simplesamlphp Ubuntu trusty *

Extended Description

There are many different kinds of mistakes that introduce information exposures. The severity of the error can range widely, depending on the context in which the product operates, the type of sensitive information that is revealed, and the benefits it may provide to an attacker. Some kinds of sensitive information include:

Information might be sensitive to different parties, each of which may have their own expectations for whether the information should be protected. These parties include:

Information exposures can occur in different ways:

It is common practice to describe any loss of confidentiality as an “information exposure,” but this can lead to overuse of CWE-200 in CWE mapping. From the CWE perspective, loss of confidentiality is a technical impact that can arise from dozens of different weaknesses, such as insecure file permissions or out-of-bounds read. CWE-200 and its lower-level descendants are intended to cover the mistakes that occur in behaviors that explicitly manage, store, transfer, or cleanse sensitive information.

Potential Mitigations

  • Compartmentalize the system to have “safe” areas where trust boundaries can be unambiguously drawn. Do not allow sensitive data to go outside of the trust boundary and always be careful when interfacing with a compartment outside of the safe area.
  • Ensure that appropriate compartmentalization is built into the system design, and the compartmentalization allows for and reinforces privilege separation functionality. Architects and designers should rely on the principle of least privilege to decide the appropriate time to use privileges and the time to drop privileges.

References