CVE-2011-5011 in xt:Commerce
Summary
by MITRE
Multiple cross-site request forgery (CSRF) vulnerabilities in xt:Commerce 3.0.4 SP2.1 and possibly earlier allow remote attackers to hijack the authentication of Admins for requests that (1) set a New user to Admin via the cID parameter to a statusconfirm action in admin/customers.php and (2) grant permissions to users via the cID parameter to a save action in admin/accounting.php.
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Analysis
by VulDB Data Team • 01/25/2018
The CVE-2011-5011 vulnerability represents a critical cross-site request forgery issue affecting xt:Commerce version 3.0.4 SP2.1 and potentially earlier releases. This vulnerability resides within the administrative interface of the e-commerce platform, specifically targeting the customer management and user permission systems. The flaw stems from the absence of proper anti-CSRF mechanisms in critical administrative endpoints, allowing malicious actors to exploit the trust relationship between authenticated administrators and the web application.
The technical implementation of this vulnerability exploits the lack of CSRF tokens or validation mechanisms in two specific administrative PHP scripts. The first vector targets the customers.php file where the statusconfirm action accepts a cID parameter without proper authentication verification, enabling attackers to elevate user privileges by manipulating the administrative interface. The second vector operates through the accounting.php file where the save action processes cID parameters to grant user permissions, creating an opportunity for unauthorized privilege escalation. These parameters are processed without sufficient validation or anti-CSRF token verification, making them susceptible to exploitation through crafted malicious requests.
The operational impact of this vulnerability is severe as it allows remote attackers to completely compromise administrative accounts without requiring authentication credentials. An attacker could potentially elevate a regular user account to administrator status or grant elevated permissions to malicious users, effectively taking full control of the e-commerce platform. This vulnerability specifically targets the administrative backend, meaning that successful exploitation would provide access to customer data, product information, order processing capabilities, and system configuration settings. The attack requires minimal user interaction as the exploitation can occur through social engineering or by tricking an authenticated administrator into visiting a malicious website, making it particularly dangerous in production environments.
The vulnerability aligns with CWE-352, which specifically addresses Cross-Site Request Forgery weaknesses in web applications. From an ATT&CK framework perspective, this vulnerability maps to T1078 Valid Accounts and T1566 Phishing, as it leverages legitimate administrative sessions to perform unauthorized actions. Organizations should implement immediate mitigations including the addition of anti-CSRF tokens to all administrative actions, implementing proper session management controls, and ensuring that all parameter-based administrative operations require proper authentication verification. The recommended solution involves updating to a patched version of xt:Commerce or implementing custom CSRF protection mechanisms that validate the origin of requests and ensure that all administrative actions require proper token validation before execution.