Hi Guys,



This is my first time posting a vulnerability since most of my private

research has been done on very small projects, many of which were

never released.



Anyways, down to the vulnerability:









Poster version.two privilege escalation:

========================================



Poster version.two is an up and coming php news posting system which has

already been put into use by many websites, mostly minor ‘blog’ style

sites, but due to its growing popularity this may soon change.



If a user has their account type set to 'normal' by the administrator, 

then

they cannot edit other peoples accounts, nor can they edit other peoples

posts, they are harmless to the site.



Sadly, there is a fairly dangerous vulnerability within the 'index.php' 

file

in the 'edit account' section of the code, which places data from the

username, password and email address fields straight into the 'mem.php'

(user password and privileges) file.



A normal 'mem.php' file looks like this:



[-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

=-]



<?

James|password|email@address.com|admin|

Jack|password|email@address.com|normal|

?>



[-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

=-]



Where James has an administrator account, and Jack doesn't.



The normal user, Jack, could decide to change his account details to:



Username: Jack

Password: password

Email:    email@address.com|admin|



Notice the '|admin|' appended to the end of the address.

When Jack saved his details his account would appear as:



Jack|password|email@address.com|admin||normal|



The 'index.php' file would take the first four parameters as the account

details and type, then seeing that parameter four was '|admin|', it

would assign Jack administrator privilidges.



Jack could then delete all the posts and accounts on the site when he 

next logged in.



Although I do not know PHP very well, this is a very common 

vulnerability, or so

I have found, and this should be addressed within all sorts of 

applications

as soon as possible!



Thank-you for reading this,



-Peter Winter-Smith



[About Me]



I am 16 years old, I study at Christ Church high school, in London, 

England, and

I am taking my GCSEs this year.

My personal interests are Visual Basic and 16 bit assembly language 

programming.

I usually don't release vulnerabilites unless they need wide-spread 

attention.



Please feel free to contact me at:

Email: peter4020@hotmail.com

Aim: GenericCode