Vulnerability Note VU#750796

Liferay Portal p_p_id parameter vulnerable to persistent cross-site scripting

Overview

Liferay Portal is vulnerable to persistent cross-site scripting via the p_p_id parameter, which can allow a remote, unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary script in the context of the portal administrator.

I. Description

Liferay Portal is a web portal that can provide Java applets that adhere to the JSR 168 portlet specification. Liferay is available as a free community-supported version and also a commercial enterprise version. Liferay Portal fails to properly sanitize data that is provided by the p_p_id parameter, which can be provided without authentication as part of an HTTP GET request. The provided data is placed into a database, where it can be displayed to an administrator in another page, such as the Plugins Configuration section of the Control Panel. This allows for persistent cross-site scripting (XSS).

II. Impact

A remote, unauthenticated attacker may be able to execute arbitrary script in the context of the portal administrator.

III. Solution

Apply an update

This issue is addressed in Liferay Portal 5.3.0. Please see Liferay issue LPS-6034 for more details.

Systems Affected

Vendor	Status	Date Notified	Date Updated
Liferay, Inc.	Vulnerable	2009-11-13	2010-01-05

References

http://issues.liferay.com/browse/LPS-6034
http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=168

Credit

Thanks to Tomasz Kuczynski for reporting this vulnerability.

This document was written by Will Dormann.

Other Information

Date Public:	2010-01-05
Date First Published:	2010-01-05
Date Last Updated:	2010-01-05
CERT Advisory:
CVE-ID(s):	CVE-2009-3742
NVD-ID(s):	CVE-2009-3742
US-CERT Technical Alerts:
Metric:	8.64
Document Revision:	9