Vulnerability Note VU#314540

Pubcookie application server modules contain cross-site scripting vulnerabilities

Original Release date: 23 Mar 2006 | Last revised: 26 Apr 2006

Overview

Cross-site scripting vulnerabilities in the Pubcookie application server modules could allow a remote attacker to gain access to sensitive information.

Description

Pubcookie is a software package that provides intra-institutional single-sign-on authentication for end-users over the web. The Pubcookie development team has discovered several cross-site scripting vulnerabilities in the Pubcookie Apache module (mod_pubcookie) and IIS ISAPI filter. Because of flaws in the way these modules handle untrusted user-supplied data when printing responses to the browser, an attacker may be able to supply crafted requests containing script or HTML. By luring an unsuspecting user to view the staged content, an attacker can redirect the user to a vulnerable Pubcookie application server and gain access to sensitive information.

Impact

An attacker with the ability to inject malicious script may be able to gain access to private Pubcookie data, including a user's authentication assertion cookies and application session cookies.

Solution

Upgrade

The Pubcookie project has released versions 3.3.0a (current production release, Unix and Windows) and 3.2.1b (Unix-only patch release) that contain fixes for this vulnerability.

These releases are available from the project's downloads page. Users running an affected version of the software are encouraged to upgrade to one of the patch releases listed above.

Systems Affected (Learn More)

VendorStatusDate NotifiedDate Updated
University of WashingtonAffected-21 Mar 2006
If you are a vendor and your product is affected, let us know.

CVSS Metrics (Learn More)

Group Score Vector
Base N/A N/A
Temporal N/A N/A
Environmental N/A N/A

References

Credit

Thanks to Nathan Dors of the University of Washington Pubcookie project for reporting this vulnerability. Nathan, in turn, credits Ben Maurer of Carnegie Mellon University with reporting the initial vulnerability.

This document was written by Chad R Dougherty based on information supplied by the reporter.

Other Information

  • CVE IDs: Unknown
  • Date Public: 06 Mar 2006
  • Date First Published: 23 Mar 2006
  • Date Last Updated: 26 Apr 2006
  • Severity Metric: 11.12
  • Document Revision: 22

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