Joomla: Session hijacking vulnerability, CVE-2008-4122

References

http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2008-4122
http://int21.de/cve/CVE-2008-4122-joomla.html
http://enablesecurity.com/2008/08/11/surf-jack-https-will-not-save-you/
https://www.defcon.org/html/defcon-16/dc-16-speakers.html#Perry

Description

When configuring a web application to use only ssl (e. g. by forwarding all 
http-requests to https), a user would expect that sniffing and hijacking the 
session is impossible.

Though, for this to be secure, one needs to set the session cookie to have the 
secure flag. Else the cookie will be transferred through http if the victim's 
browser does a single http-request on the same domain.

Joomla 1.5.8 does not set that flag. I've contacted the Joomla security team 
in advance but got no reply.

Disclosure Timeline

2008-11-18: Vendor contacted
2008-12-16 Published advisory

Credits and copyright

This vulnerability was discovered by Hanno Boeck of schokokeks.org webhosting. 
It's licensed under the creative commons attribution license.

Hanno Boeck, http://www.hboeck.de

-- 
Hanno Böck    Blog:    http://www.hboeck.de/
GPG: 3DBD3B20    Jabber/Mail:  hanno@hboeck.de