• Advisory ID: DRUPAL-SA-2008-007
• Project: Drupal core
• Version: 4.7.x, 5.x
• Date: 2008-January-10
• Security risk: Less critical
• Exploitable from: Remote
• Vulnerability: Cross site scripting when register_globals is enabled.

Description

When theme .tpl.php files are accessible via the web and the PHP setting register_globals is set to enabled, anonymous users are able to execute cross site scripting attacks via specially crafted links.

Drupals .htaccess attempts to set register_globals to disabled and also prevents access to .tpl.php files. Only when both these measures are not effective and your PHP interpreter is configured with register_globals set to enabled, will this issue affect you.

Versions affected

• Drupal 4.7.x
• Drupal 5.x

Solutions

1. Disable register_globals. Please refer to the PHP documentation on information how to configure PHP.
2. Ensure .tpl.php files are not accessible via the web.

Drupal 4.7.11 and 5.6 will present a warning on the administration page when register_globals is enabled. Drupal 5.6 will refuse installation on an insecurely configured server. Existing sites will continue to work.

Reported by

Ultra Security Research.

Contact

The security contact for Drupal can be reached at security at drupal.org or via the form at http://drupal.org/contact.

• Advisory ID: DRUPAL-SA-2008-006
• Project: Drupal core
• Version: 4.7.x, 5.x
• Date: 2008-January-10
• Security risk: Moderately critical
• Exploitable from: Remote
• Vulnerability: Cross site scripting

Description

When outputting plaintext Drupal strips potentially dangerous HTML tags and attributes from HTML, and escapes characters which have a special meaning in HTML. This output filtering secures the site against cross site scripting attacks via user input.

Certain byte sequences that are invalid in the UTF8 specification are not handled properly by Internet Explorer 6 and may lead it to see a multibyte start character where none is present. Internet Explorer 6 then consumes a number of subsequent UTF-8 characters. This may lead to unsafe attributes that were outside a tag for the filter to appear inside a tag for Internet Explorer 6. This behaviour can then be used to insert and execute javascript in the context of the website.

Wikipedia has more information about cross site scripting (XSS).

Versions affected

• Drupal 4.7.x before version 4.7.11.
• Drupal 5.x before version 5.6.

Solution

Install the latest version:

• If you are running Drupal 4.7.x then upgrade to Drupal 4.7.11.
• If you are running Drupal 5.x then upgrade to Drupal 5.6.

If you are unable to upgrade immediately, you can apply a patch to secure your installation until you are able to do a proper upgrade.

• To patch Drupal 4.7.10 use SA-2008-006-4.7.10.patch.
• To patch Drupal 5.5 use SA-2008-006-5.5.patch.

Important note

Drupal 4.7.11 and 5.6 now require PHP 4.3.5 or higher as the minimum version.

Use of modules that purposely insert bytes that are invalid UTF-8 characters, such as GeSHi Filter and Code Filter will cause any text using the filter to not be displayed. Disable the modules until a solution has been found.

Reported by

The vulnerability was discovered during an audit of Drupal core by Stefan Esser, Mayflower GmbH and Zend.

The Drupal security team wants to thank Die Zeit, who commissioned the audit, for sharing the results.

Contact

The security contact for Drupal can be reached at security at drupal.org or via the form at http://drupal.org/contact.

• Advisory ID: DRUPAL-SA-2008-005
• Project: Drupal core
• Version: 4.7.x, 5.x
• Date: 2008-January-10
• Security risk: Less critical
• Exploitable from: Remote
• Vulnerability: Cross site request forgery

Description

The aggregator module fetches items from RSS feeds and makes them available on the site. The module provides an option to remove items from a particular feed. This has been implemented as a simple GET request and is therefore vulnerable to cross site request forgeries. For example: Should a privileged user view a page containing an <img> tag with a specially constructed src pointing to a remove items URL, the items would be removed.

Versions affected

• Drupal 4.7.x before version 4.7.11.
• Drupal 5.x before version 5.6.

Solution

Install the latest version:

• If you are running Drupal 4.7.x then upgrade to Drupal 4.7.11.
• If you are running Drupal 5.x then upgrade to Drupal 5.6.

If you are unable to upgrade immediately, you can apply a patch to secure your installation until you are able to do a proper upgrade.

• To patch Drupal 4.7.10 use SA-2008-005-4.7.10.patch.
• To patch Drupal 5.5 use SA-2008-005-5.5.patch.

Reported by

The Drupal security team.

Contact

The security contact for Drupal can be reached at security at drupal.org or via the form at http://drupal.org/contact.