Hi,

A description of this exploit has been posted here:
http://lists.webappsec.org/pipermail/websecurity_lists.webappsec.org/2011-February/007533.html

[I presume any bad guys will have seen that post, so didn't see why not
to point people to it on this mailing list.]

Jon

On Thu, 2011-02-10 at 10:06 +1300, Michael Koziarski wrote:
> > 1. Where is the complete Advisory? The Impact section is very unclear.
> > Looking at the comment in the 2.3 patch mentions "Flash animations and
> > Java applets" - does the whole thing deserve a bit more explaining?
> 
> We've been deliberately vague in the description of the exploit so as
> not to provide ready-made exploit kits to attack other frameworks and
> rails applications which haven't been upgraded.  We've been contacted
> since by a browser vendor and a few other frameworks requesting
> details.  I'm sure the full details of how this can be exploited are
> already available in some circles but for now we're not going to make
> that job any easier.
> 
> I don't think providing any more details here will help anyone, it
> affects your users and is easily exploitable.
> 
> 
> > 2. Lines 40-48 in the 2.3 patch changes the CSRF protection to only
> > allow get requests and requests with the correct form authenticity
> > token through - is this not going to break stateless web service and
> > ActiveResource post requests that does not maintain state on the
> > client side? - line 228 in the 2.3 patch tests that xml requests
> > should be validated for authenticity token. This is going to break
> > quite a few things.
> >
> > Should Rails by default (still) support authenticated stateless
> > requests (for the sake of web services)? Or should we handle this by
> > overriding handle_unverified_request (line 31 patch 2.3)?
> >
> > What am I missing?
> 
> You don't need to override anything. The behaviour of
> handle_unverified_request is to reset the session, this should not in
> any way affect your API clients (or anything else stateless).  However
> if you've already overridden verify_request_token in your app you'll
> need to remove that.
> 
> API requests will indeed cause handle_unverified_request to be called,
> however it won't affect them at all as they won't notice that the
> session cookie has 'changed' as they didn't use it in the first place.
> 
> If you have API requests which *do* rely on the session, then you're
> fucked as that's a CSRF request by definition.
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Cheers
> 
> Koz
> 

-- 
http://jonathanleighton.com/

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