CVE-2008-6832 in JIRA
Summary
by MITRE
Cross-site request forgery (CSRF) vulnerability in Atlassian JIRA Enterprise Edition 3.13 allows remote attackers to hijack the authentication of unspecified victims via unknown vectors. NOTE: the provenance of this information is unknown; the details are obtained solely from third party information.
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Analysis
by VulDB Data Team • 11/10/2018
The CVE-2008-6832 vulnerability represents a critical cross-site request forgery flaw discovered in Atlassian JIRA Enterprise Edition version 3.13, a widely used issue tracking and project management platform. This vulnerability falls under the CWE-352 category, which specifically addresses Cross-Site Request Forgery attacks, making it a fundamental web application security weakness that has plagued numerous enterprise systems over the years. The vulnerability's significance lies in its ability to allow remote attackers to manipulate authenticated sessions without proper authorization, potentially leading to complete system compromise when combined with other attack vectors.
The technical implementation of this CSRF vulnerability in JIRA 3.13 stems from the application's failure to properly validate and enforce request authenticity mechanisms. Attackers can exploit this weakness by crafting malicious web pages or email attachments that, when visited by an authenticated JIRA user, automatically submit requests to the target system. These requests appear legitimate to the server because they contain valid session cookies and authentication tokens, but they are initiated by the attacker rather than the user's intentional actions. The unspecified nature of the victim vectors suggests that multiple attack surfaces within the application could be compromised, including user account modifications, issue creation, or administrative functions.
The operational impact of this vulnerability extends beyond simple unauthorized access, as it can enable attackers to perform actions that may result in data breaches, privilege escalation, or complete system takeover. In enterprise environments where JIRA serves as a central collaboration platform for development teams, project management, and issue tracking, a successful CSRF attack could lead to unauthorized code deployments, modification of critical project data, or exposure of sensitive information. The vulnerability's remote exploitation capability means that attackers do not need physical access to the network or system, making it particularly dangerous in distributed or cloud-based deployments where multiple users interact with the application simultaneously.
Security practitioners should consider this vulnerability in relation to ATT&CK framework's T1566 technique for Initial Access through spearphishing, as CSRF attacks often leverage social engineering to deliver malicious payloads to unsuspecting users. The vulnerability also aligns with T1078 for Valid Accounts, as successful exploitation typically requires an authenticated session to be effective. Organizations should implement comprehensive CSRF protection mechanisms including anti-forgery tokens, origin validation, and referer header checks to prevent unauthorized requests from being processed. The remediation strategy should involve immediate patching of affected JIRA versions, implementation of proper session management controls, and regular security assessments to identify similar vulnerabilities in other enterprise applications. Additionally, user education regarding suspicious email attachments and web links remains crucial in mitigating the risk associated with CSRF attacks that rely on social engineering components.