Vulnerability Note VU#901251

ProjectForum XSS vulnerability

Overview

ProjectForum 7.0.1.3038 and possibly previous versions, are vulnerable to cross site scripting (XSS).

I. Description

CourseForum's ProjectForum software fails to sanitize all input fields. As a result, cross site scripting (XSS) attacks can be conducted. By default, a non-credentialed user can create a new webpage on a ProjectForum wiki. Each ProjectForum wiki page contains a "more" object which allows a listing of objects associated with the ProjectForum wiki webpage. An attacker can inject javascript code that will be run each time the ProjectForum wiki webpage is accessed by renaming one of the ProjectForum wiki associated objects and inserting javascript code as the name.

For example, the following javascript code can be injected into the listing of objects variable:

<IMG """><SCRIPT>alert("Vulnerable")</SCRIPT>">

II. Impact

An attacker with access to the ProjectForum wiki can conduct a cross site scripting attack, which could be used to result in information leakage, privilege escalation, and/or denial of service.

III. Solution

We are currently unaware of a practical solution to this problem.

Restrict access

As a general good security practice, only allow connections from trusted hosts and networks. Note that restricting access does not prevent XSS or CSRF attacks since the attack comes as an HTTP request from a legitimate user's host. Restricting access would prevent an attacker from accessing a ProjectForum wiki using stolen credentials from a blocked network location.

Vendor Information

Vendor	Status	Date Notified	Date Updated
CourseForum Technologies	Affected		2011-09-20

References

http://courseforum.com/pf/index.html

Credit

Thanks to Paul Davis for reporting this vulnerability.

This document was written by Michael Orlando.

Other Information

Date Public:	2011-09-30
Date First Published:	2011-09-30
Date Last Updated:	2011-09-30
CERT Advisory:
CVE-ID(s):
NVD-ID(s):
US-CERT Technical Alerts:
Severity Metric:	0.03
Document Revision:	9