CVE-2008-6048 in TangoCMS
Summary
by MITRE
Multiple cross-site request forgery (CSRF) vulnerabilities in TangoCMS before 2.2.0 allow remote attackers to hijack the authentication of administrators.
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Analysis
by VulDB Data Team • 10/27/2018
The CVE-2008-6048 vulnerability represents a critical cross-site request forgery flaw affecting TangoCMS versions prior to 2.2.0. This vulnerability operates at the application layer and specifically targets the authentication mechanisms of administrative users within the content management system. The flaw enables remote attackers to manipulate authenticated sessions by tricking administrators into executing unintended actions through malicious web pages or links. The vulnerability stems from the absence of proper anti-CSRF token validation mechanisms within the application's request processing pipeline, allowing attackers to forge requests that appear to originate from legitimate administrative users.
The technical implementation of this vulnerability involves the exploitation of the web application's trust relationship with authenticated users. When administrators access the TangoCMS administrative interface, the application should validate that requests originate from legitimate sources through the use of anti-CSRF tokens. However, in versions before 2.2.0, this validation was either absent or insufficiently implemented, creating a pathway for attackers to craft malicious requests that would be processed with administrative privileges. The flaw aligns with CWE-352, which specifically addresses cross-site request forgery vulnerabilities where applications fail to validate the source of requests. Attackers could leverage this vulnerability by constructing specially crafted web pages containing embedded requests that would automatically execute when administrators visited the malicious sites, effectively hijacking their authenticated sessions.
The operational impact of this vulnerability is severe and potentially catastrophic for organizations using affected TangoCMS versions. Successful exploitation would allow remote attackers to perform administrative actions such as modifying content, adding or removing users, changing system configurations, and potentially gaining full control over the web application. The vulnerability specifically targets administrator accounts, which typically possess the highest level of privileges within the system, making the potential damage significantly greater than typical user-level exploits. This type of vulnerability can lead to complete system compromise, data breaches, and unauthorized modifications to web content, with the attacker potentially remaining undetected for extended periods due to the legitimate nature of the forged requests.
Organizations should immediately upgrade to TangoCMS version 2.2.0 or later to address this vulnerability, as no effective workarounds exist for the affected versions. The mitigation strategy should include comprehensive patch management procedures to ensure all instances of the vulnerable software are updated. Security teams should also implement additional monitoring and logging mechanisms to detect suspicious administrative activities that might indicate exploitation attempts. The vulnerability demonstrates the importance of implementing proper input validation and request origin verification as outlined in the OWASP Top Ten and MITRE ATT&CK framework under the privilege escalation and persistence categories. Organizations should conduct thorough security assessments of their web applications to identify similar CSRF vulnerabilities in other systems and implement robust anti-CSRF token mechanisms that comply with industry best practices for web application security.