An issue was discovered in SmartClient 12.0. If an unauthenticated attacker makes a POST request to /tools/developerConsoleOperations.jsp or /isomorphic/IDACall with malformed XML data in the _transaction parameter, the server replies with a verbose error showing where the application resides (the absolute path). NOTE: the documentation states These tools are, by default, available to anyone … so they should only be deployed into a trusted environment. Alternately, the tools can easily be restricted to administrators or end users by protecting the tools path with normal authentication and authorization mechanisms on the web server.
The product generates an error message that includes sensitive information about its environment, users, or associated data.
| Name | Vendor | Start Version | End Version |
|---|---|---|---|
| Smartclient | Smartclient | 12.0 (including) | 12.0 (including) |
The sensitive information may be valuable information on its own (such as a password), or it may be useful for launching other, more serious attacks. The error message may be created in different ways:
An attacker may use the contents of error messages to help launch another, more focused attack. For example, an attempt to exploit a path traversal weakness (CWE-22) might yield the full pathname of the installed application. In turn, this could be used to select the proper number of “..” sequences to navigate to the targeted file. An attack using SQL injection (CWE-89) might not initially succeed, but an error message could reveal the malformed query, which would expose query logic and possibly even passwords or other sensitive information used within the query.