PR07-11: Cross-site Request Forgery (CSRF) on Sun Java System Identity
Manager

Date Found: 11th June 2007

Vendor Contacted: 18th June 2007

Date Public: 10th November 2008

Severity: Medium/High

Credits: Adrian Pastor and Jan Fry of ProCheckUp Ltd (www.procheckup.com). 

ProCheckUp thanks Sun for working with us.


Description:

Sun Java System Identity Manager is vulnerable to CSRF within the
administrative "update password" feature ("/idm/admin/changeself.jsp")

The "update password" request is not tokenized using non-predictable
values. Additionally, the administrative user is *not* asked to enter
the previous password before updating it. Since the request is
completely predictable it is vulnerable to CSRF.


Consequences:

Attackers can hijack administrative accounts by convincing an
administrative user to visit a malicious HTML page while being
authenticated to Sun Java System Identity Manager.


Example of "update password" request:

POST /idm/admin/changeself.jsp HTTP/1.1
Host: target.tld
Content-Length: 181
Cookie: JSESSIONID=E291DB92432831FC109C4214D8C8C8D7

id=&command=Save&activeControl=&resourceAccounts.password=Password1&resourceAccounts.confirmPassword=Password1&resourceAccounts.currentResourceAccounts%5BLighthouse%5D.selected=true



Although the original request is submitted as a 'POST', it can be also
converted to a 'GET'. The following PoC forges the "update password"
request as a 'GET'.


Proof of concept (PoC):



CSRF attack demo - changes administrative password to 'Password19'





Notes:

1. the 'resourceAccounts.currentResourceAccounts%5BLighthouse%5D'
parameter is a constant (never changes).

2. There are also other requests that are vulnerable to CSRF, but this
advisory only discusses the most interesting one (from a security point
of view).

3. This risk of this vulnerability can be mitigated by enabling
passphrase authentication on System Identity Manager. This way, users
would need to enter their username, password, and two random characters
of their secret passphrase. This means that even if the "update
password" request was successfully CSRFed, the attacker would still need
to know the victim administrator's passphrase to login.


Successfully tested on:

Server environment:

Sun Java System Identity Manager 6.0 (20061212 SP 2)
Apache-Coyote/1.1
Apache Tomcat/5.0.28

Client environment:

Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0.5730.11

Sun has confirmed the following products to be affected by this issue:

Sun Java System Identity Manager 6.0, Sun Java System Identity Manager
7.0, Sun Java System Identity Manager 7.1


References:

http://www.sun.com/software/products/identity_mgr/index.xml 
http://www.procheckup.com/Vulnerabilities 


Fix:

Apply the patches released by Sun. This vulnerability has been filed as
Sun Bugzilla bug 16703.

For more information please see
http://sunsolve.sun.com/search/document.do?assetkey=1-26-243386-1 


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