CVE-2011-0046 in Bugzilla
Summary
by MITRE
Multiple cross-site request forgery (CSRF) vulnerabilities in Bugzilla before 3.2.10, 3.4.x before 3.4.10, 3.6.x before 3.6.4, and 4.0.x before 4.0rc2 allow remote attackers to hijack the authentication of arbitrary users for requests related to (1) adding a saved search in buglist.cgi, (2) voting in votes.cgi, (3) sanity checking in sanitycheck.cgi, (4) creating or editing a chart in chart.cgi, (5) column changing in colchange.cgi, and (6) adding, deleting, or approving a quip in quips.cgi.
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Analysis
by VulDB Data Team • 10/13/2021
The vulnerability identified as CVE-2011-0046 represents a critical cross-site request forgery flaw affecting multiple versions of the Bugzilla bug tracking system. This vulnerability resides in the web application's authentication and authorization mechanisms, specifically targeting the lack of proper CSRF protection across several key administrative and user interaction endpoints. The flaw allows remote attackers to manipulate authenticated sessions by tricking users into executing unintended actions without their knowledge or consent, effectively enabling session hijacking and unauthorized modifications to the bug tracking environment. The vulnerability spans across multiple release branches including 3.2.x, 3.4.x, 3.6.x, and 4.0.x, indicating a widespread issue that affected a significant portion of Bugzilla deployments in 2011.
The technical implementation of this vulnerability stems from the absence of anti-CSRF tokens or similar validation mechanisms in critical CGI scripts within the Bugzilla application. Specifically the affected endpoints include buglist.cgi for saved search management, votes.cgi for voting functionality, sanitycheck.cgi for system validation, chart.cgi for chart creation and editing, colchange.cgi for column configuration changes, and quips.cgi for quip management. These scripts process user requests without verifying the authenticity of the request origin or validating that the request was genuinely initiated by the authenticated user. The flaw directly maps to CWE-352, which defines Cross-Site Request Forgery as a weakness where a web application fails to validate that requests originate from the legitimate user. Attackers can exploit this by crafting malicious web pages or embedding malicious links that automatically submit requests to the vulnerable Bugzilla instance, thereby performing unauthorized actions such as adding malicious saved searches, altering vote counts, modifying system configurations, or manipulating quip entries.
The operational impact of this vulnerability extends beyond simple data manipulation to potentially compromise the integrity and availability of the entire bug tracking system. An attacker could leverage these CSRF vulnerabilities to inject malicious saved searches that redirect users to phishing sites, manipulate voting systems to influence bug prioritization, perform sanity checks that could disrupt system functionality, create or modify charts to display false information, change column configurations to hide critical bug information, or add/delete quips that could contain malicious content or misinformation. The cumulative effect of these attacks could severely undermine the trustworthiness of the bug tracking system and compromise the security of the development environment. This vulnerability particularly affects organizations that rely heavily on Bugzilla for managing software development workflows, as it could enable attackers to manipulate the very tools used for tracking and prioritizing security issues. The impact aligns with ATT&CK technique T1566, which describes credential harvesting through social engineering and malicious web content, and T1071.004, which covers application layer protocol manipulation.
Organizations affected by this vulnerability should implement immediate mitigation strategies including upgrading to patched versions of Bugzilla, specifically versions 3.2.10, 3.4.10, 3.6.4, and 4.0rc2 respectively. The recommended approach involves deploying anti-CSRF tokens in all user-facing CGI scripts that modify system state or user data. Security administrators should also consider implementing additional protections such as requiring multi-factor authentication for administrative functions, monitoring for unusual patterns in saved search creation or voting activities, and conducting regular security audits of the web application's request handling mechanisms. The vulnerability serves as a reminder of the critical importance of CSRF protection in web applications and demonstrates how seemingly minor implementation flaws can result in significant security compromises. Organizations should also review their web application security practices to ensure that all state-changing operations include proper validation mechanisms and that legacy applications receive appropriate security updates to prevent exploitation of known vulnerabilities.