CVE-2015-2308: Esi Code Injection

Affected Versions

All 2.0.X, 2.1.X, 2.2.X, 2.3.X, 2.4.X, 2.5.X, and 2.6.X versions of the Symfony HttpKernel component are affected by this security issue.

This issue has been fixed in Symfony 2.3.27, 2.5.11, and 2.6.6. Note that no fixes are provided for Symfony 2.0, 2.1, 2.2, and 2.4 as they are not maintained anymore.

Description

Applications with ESI support (and SSI support as of Symfony 2.6) enabled and using the Symfony built-in reverse proxy (the ``Symfony\Component\HttpKernel\HttpCache` class) are vulnerable to PHP code injection; a malicious user can inject PHP code that will be executed by the server.

HttpCache uses eval() to execute files in its cache when they contain ESI tags (and only when ESI is enabled). The vulnerability comes from the fact that PHP allows contents of <script language="php"> tags to be executed (and this kind of PHP tags is always available regardless of the configuration), but there were not escaped before the evaluation.

A possible exploit comes from websites also vulnerable to Cross-Site Scripting as an attacker can successfully conduct a PHP code injection attack by passing such a tag in a user submitted variable (for which proper output escaping was not applied).

Resolution

The fix implements a much stricter escaping on user submitted values to remove the possibility to inject PHP code.

The patch for this issue is available here.

Credits

I would like to thank Takeshi Terada of Mitsui Bussan Secure Directions, Inc. for reporting this security issue and Nicolas Grekas of Blackfire.io for providing a fix.

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Published in #Security Advisories