Re: Wordpress Cookie Authentication Vulnerability

[Juha-Matti Laurio <juha-matti.laurio () netti fi>]

This issue is SA27714 (severity 1/5)
http://secunia.com/advisories/27714/

and FrSIRT/ADV-2007-3941 (severity 1/4)
http://www.frsirt.com/english/advisories/2007/3941

too.

Secunia advisory lists these workarounds:
"Grant only trusted users read access to the "users" table.
Restrict access to the "wp-admin" directory (e.g. with ".htaccess")."

- Juha-Matti

> Right this problem has existed for a long time, but it's not the end of
> the world for someone to point it out again I suppose.
>
> I think it's obvious that there's another main issue here and that's the
> way WordPress handles its cookies in general.  They are not temporary
> sessions that expire or are only valid upon successful authentication.
> The cookies work for ever.. or at least until the password changes.  If
> someone uses an XSS attack to obtain the cookies or sniffs them (most
> blogs are just HTTP) they can essentially permanently authenticate.  The
> same result occurs with being able to read the database.
>
> Furthermore, one could in theory conduct a bruteforce attack against the
> WordPress password by just making normal requests to the blog but changing
> the cookies that does the double MD5 of the password.  You could in theory
> emulate normal continued browsing of the website while sending
> MD5(MD5(password)) over and over with each request via the cookie.  Other
> than perhaps a large increase in browsing of the blog, this could possibly
> go unnoticed as an attack -- as it would not be logged anywhere (in most
> instances) that the cookies were being presented.  Once authenticated into
> WordPress, the normal blog pages look different, so it would not require
> an attacker to access the Admin area to verify.
>
> Anyway, good to see the CVE is already there.  Maybe better session
> management will find its way into WordPress.
>
>
> Steven
> http://www.securityzone.org
(>..runs on WordPress.. oh noes!)
> > This is CVE-2007-6013 since 19th Nov including WordPress ticket #5367:
> >
> > http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2007-6013
> >
> > - Juha-Matti
--clip--

_______________________________________________
Full-Disclosure - We believe in it.
Charter: http://lists.grok.org.uk/full-disclosure-charter.html
Hosted and sponsored by Secunia - http://secunia.com/