An issue was discovered in OpenNDS Captive Portal before version 10.1.2. When the custom unescape callback is enabled, attackers can execute arbitrary OS commands by inserting them into the URL portion of HTTP GET requests. Affected OpenNDS Captive Portal before version 10.1.2 fixed in OpenWrt master, OpenWrt 23.05 and OpenWrt 22.03 on 28. August 2023 by updating OpenNDS to version 10.1.3.
The product prepares a structured message for communication with another component, but encoding or escaping of the data is either missing or done incorrectly. As a result, the intended structure of the message is not preserved.
| Name | Vendor | Start Version | End Version |
|---|---|---|---|
| Captive_portal | Opennds | * | 10.1.2 (excluding) |
| Opennds | Ubuntu | bionic | * |
| Opennds | Ubuntu | lunar | * |
| Opennds | Ubuntu | mantic | * |
| Opennds | Ubuntu | trusty | * |
| Opennds | Ubuntu | xenial | * |
Improper encoding or escaping can allow attackers to change the commands that are sent to another component, inserting malicious commands instead. Most products follow a certain protocol that uses structured messages for communication between components, such as queries or commands. These structured messages can contain raw data interspersed with metadata or control information. For example, “GET /index.html HTTP/1.1” is a structured message containing a command (“GET”) with a single argument ("/index.html") and metadata about which protocol version is being used (“HTTP/1.1”). If an application uses attacker-supplied inputs to construct a structured message without properly encoding or escaping, then the attacker could insert special characters that will cause the data to be interpreted as control information or metadata. Consequently, the component that receives the output will perform the wrong operations, or otherwise interpret the data incorrectly.