CVE Vulnerabilities

CVE-2023-41330

Deserialization of Untrusted Data

Published: Sep 06, 2023 | Modified: Sep 12, 2023
CVSS 3.x
9.8
CRITICAL
Source:
NVD
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
CVSS 2.x
RedHat/V2
RedHat/V3
Ubuntu

knplabs/knp-snappy is a PHP library allowing thumbnail, snapshot or PDF generation from a url or a html page.

Issue

On March 17th the vulnerability CVE-2023-28115 was disclosed, allowing an attacker to gain remote code execution through PHAR deserialization. Version 1.4.2 added a check if (strpos($filename, phar://) === 0) in the prepareOutput function to resolve this CVE, however if the user is able to control the second parameter of the generateFromHtml() function of Snappy, it will then be passed as the $filename parameter in the prepareOutput() function. In the original vulnerability, a file name with a phar:// wrapper could be sent to the fileExists() function, equivalent to the file_exists() PHP function. This allowed users to trigger a deserialization on arbitrary PHAR files. To fix this issue, the string is now passed to the strpos() function and if it starts with phar://, an exception is raised. However, PHP wrappers being case insensitive, this patch can be bypassed using PHAR:// instead of phar://. A successful exploitation of this vulnerability allows executing arbitrary code and accessing the underlying filesystem. The attacker must be able to upload a file and the server must be running a PHP version prior to 8. This issue has been addressed in commit d3b742d61a which has been included in version 1.4.3. Users are advised to upgrade. Users unable to upgrade should ensure that only trusted users may submit data to the AbstractGenerator->generate(...) function.

Weakness

The product deserializes untrusted data without sufficiently verifying that the resulting data will be valid.

Affected Software

Name Vendor Start Version End Version
Snappy Knplabs * 1.4.3 (excluding)

Extended Description

It is often convenient to serialize objects for communication or to save them for later use. However, deserialized data or code can often be modified without using the provided accessor functions if it does not use cryptography to protect itself. Furthermore, any cryptography would still be client-side security – which is a dangerous security assumption. Data that is untrusted can not be trusted to be well-formed. When developers place no restrictions on “gadget chains,” or series of instances and method invocations that can self-execute during the deserialization process (i.e., before the object is returned to the caller), it is sometimes possible for attackers to leverage them to perform unauthorized actions, like generating a shell.

Potential Mitigations

  • Make fields transient to protect them from deserialization.
  • An attempt to serialize and then deserialize a class containing transient fields will result in NULLs where the transient data should be. This is an excellent way to prevent time, environment-based, or sensitive variables from being carried over and used improperly.

References