WhoDB is an open source database management tool. In affected versions the application is vulnerable to parameter injection in database connection strings, which allows an attacker to read local files on the machine the application is running on. The application uses string concatenation to build database connection URIs which are then passed to corresponding libraries responsible for setting up the database connections. This string concatenation is done unsafely and without escaping or encoding the user input. This allows an user, in many cases, to inject arbitrary parameters into the URI string. These parameters can be potentially dangerous depending on the libraries used. One of these dangerous parameters is allowAllFiles in the library github.com/go-sql-driver/mysql. Should this be set to true, the library enables running the LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE query on any file on the host machine (in this case, the machine that WhoDB is running on). By injecting &allowAllFiles=true into the connection URI and connecting to any MySQL server (such as an attacker-controlled one), the attacker is able to read local files. This issue has been addressed in version 0.45.0 and all users are advised to upgrade. There are no known workarounds for this vulnerability.
The product generates a query intended to access or manipulate data in a data store such as a database, but it does not neutralize or incorrectly neutralizes special elements that can modify the intended logic of the query.
Depending on the capabilities of the query language, an attacker could inject additional logic into the query to:
The ability to execute additional commands or change which entities are returned has obvious risks. But when the product logic depends on the order or number of entities, this can also lead to vulnerabilities. For example, if the query expects to return only one entity that specifies an administrative user, but an attacker can change which entities are returned, this could cause the logic to return information for a regular user and incorrectly assume that the user has administrative privileges. While this weakness is most commonly associated with SQL injection, there are many other query languages that are also subject to injection attacks, including HTSQL, LDAP, DQL, XQuery, Xpath, and “NoSQL” languages.