A vulnerability relating to insufficient access control has been identified in the session management of the Sesame Time web application and its REST v3 API. The flaw lies in the fact that the system uses the session identifier (USID) as the sole validation mechanism, without verifying whether that identifier legitimately belongs to the user making the request. As a result, an attacker who obtains a valid USID can impersonate a victim’s session and access their confidential information, including emails, user IDs, roles and corporate data. This vulnerability is exacerbated by poor session lifecycle management: new logins generate additional USIDs without revoking the previous ones, allowing multiple active sessions to coexist and thereby expanding the attack surface.
Weakness
The system’s authorization functionality does not prevent one user from gaining access to another user’s data or record by modifying the key value identifying the data.
Extended Description
Retrieval of a user record occurs in the system based on some key value that is under user control. The key would typically identify a user-related record stored in the system and would be used to lookup that record for presentation to the user. It is likely that an attacker would have to be an authenticated user in the system. However, the authorization process would not properly check the data access operation to ensure that the authenticated user performing the operation has sufficient entitlements to perform the requested data access, hence bypassing any other authorization checks present in the system. For example, attackers can look at places where user specific data is retrieved (e.g. search screens) and determine whether the key for the item being looked up is controllable externally. The key may be a hidden field in the HTML form field, might be passed as a URL parameter or as an unencrypted cookie variable, then in each of these cases it will be possible to tamper with the key value. One manifestation of this weakness is when a system uses sequential or otherwise easily-guessable session IDs that would allow one user to easily switch to another user’s session and read/modify their data.