CVE-2018-1658 in Jazz Foundation
Summary
by MITRE
IBM Jazz Foundation (IBM Rational Collaborative Lifecycle Management 5.0 through 6.0.6) is vulnerable to HTTP header injection, caused by improper validation of input. By persuading a victim to visit a specially-crafted Web page, a remote attacker could exploit this vulnerability to inject arbitrary HTTP headers, which will allow the attacker to conduct various attacks against the vulnerable system, including cross-site scripting, cache poisoning or session hijacking. IBM X-Force ID: 144884.
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Analysis
by VulDB Data Team • 08/01/2023
The vulnerability identified as CVE-2018-1658 affects IBM Jazz Foundation components within IBM Rational Collaborative Lifecycle Management versions 5.0 through 6.0.6, representing a critical HTTP header injection flaw that stems from inadequate input validation mechanisms. This weakness allows malicious actors to manipulate HTTP headers through crafted web content, creating a significant attack surface that can be exploited remotely without requiring authentication or specialized privileges. The vulnerability resides in the application's failure to properly sanitize user-supplied input before incorporating it into HTTP response headers, creating a pathway for attackers to inject malicious header content that can be interpreted by web browsers or intermediary systems.
The technical exploitation of this vulnerability follows a well-established pattern that aligns with CWE-113, which specifically addresses improper neutralization of characters or elements of the relevant markup. Attackers can craft malicious web pages that, when visited by unsuspecting users, trigger the injection of arbitrary HTTP headers into the application's responses. This injection capability enables multiple attack vectors including cross-site scripting attacks where malicious script code can be executed in the victim's browser context, cache poisoning operations that can corrupt web caches and affect multiple users, and session hijacking attempts that can compromise user authentication tokens and access credentials. The attack typically involves embedding specially crafted input parameters within URLs or form submissions that bypass standard validation checks and are subsequently processed without proper sanitization.
The operational impact of this vulnerability extends beyond immediate exploitation to create persistent security risks within enterprise development environments where IBM Rational Collaborative Lifecycle Management systems are deployed. Organizations utilizing these tools face potential data breaches, unauthorized access to development resources, and compromise of intellectual property stored within the lifecycle management platform. The vulnerability's remote nature means that attackers can leverage public web resources or social engineering techniques to deliver malicious payloads without requiring physical access to the target network. This makes the attack surface particularly concerning for development teams that rely on collaborative platforms for managing sensitive software development processes, requirement tracking, and project documentation.
Mitigation strategies for CVE-2018-1658 should prioritize immediate patching of affected IBM Rational Collaborative Lifecycle Management versions to address the root cause of the input validation failure. Organizations should implement comprehensive input sanitization measures that filter or escape special characters in user-supplied data before processing, particularly focusing on header injection patterns that could compromise HTTP responses. Network-level protections including web application firewalls and content filtering systems can provide additional defense-in-depth layers to detect and block suspicious header injection attempts. Security monitoring should be enhanced to detect anomalous HTTP header patterns and unusual request behaviors that might indicate exploitation attempts. The vulnerability's classification aligns with ATT&CK technique T1190, which covers exploitation of remote services, and T1059, covering command and scripting interpreters, as attackers can leverage the injected headers to execute malicious code or establish persistent access to the vulnerable systems. Organizations should also conduct thorough vulnerability assessments of their entire development ecosystem to identify similar input validation weaknesses that could be exploited through comparable attack vectors.