Overview
The cybersecurity landscape is constantly evolving, and today we are here to talk about a serious vulnerability that has been discovered in supported versions of Mahara 24.04 and 23.04, specifically versions before 24.04.1 and 23.04.6. This vulnerability, designated CVE-2024-39335, allows for the potential disclosure of sensitive information to an institution administrator and under certain conditions, could lead to a system compromise or data leakage. This vulnerability is significant because Mahara is a widely used open-source ePortfolio system, and a successful exploit could affect a vast number of users and institutions.
Vulnerability Summary
CVE ID: CVE-2024-39335
Severity: Critical (CVSS score of 9.1)
Attack Vector: Network
Privileges Required: Low
User Interaction: Required
Impact: Potential system compromise or data leakage
Affected Products
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Product | Affected Versions
Mahara | 24.04 before 24.04.1
Mahara | 23.04 before 23.04.6
How the Exploit Works
The exploit operates by taking advantage of the ‘Current submissions’ page accessible via Administration -> Groups -> Submissions. Under certain conditions, this page discloses vital information to an institution administrator. This information could potentially be used to compromise the system or lead to data leakage. The exact mechanism of the exploit isn’t disclosed to prevent misuse, but the vulnerability lies in the failure of proper access controls on the mentioned administration page.
Conceptual Example Code
Here is a conceptual example of how the vulnerability might be exploited. The attacker, having gained low-level privileges, could make a request to the ‘Current submissions’ page like this:
GET /admin/groups/submissions HTTP/1.1
Host: target.example.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Referer: http://target.example.com/login
Cookie: session=malicious_session
Connection: keep-aliveThis request, under certain circumstances, could reveal sensitive information to the attacker, leading to a system compromise or data leakage.
Mitigation Guidance
To mitigate this vulnerability, administrators should immediately apply the vendor’s patch to upgrade to version 24.04.1 or 23.04.6. Until this can be done, the use of a Web Application Firewall (WAF) or an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) could serve as a temporary mitigation. However, these should not be considered long-term solutions, and patching should be the priority.