Stopping Drupal’s SA-CORE-2019-003 Vulnerability

On the 20th February 2019, Drupal announced that they had discovered a severe vulnerability and that they would be releasing a patch for it the next day. Drupal is a Content Management System used by many of our customers, which made it important that our WAF protect against the vulnerability as quickly as possible.

As soon as Drupal released their patch, we analysed it to establish what kind of payloads could be used against it and created rules to mitigate these. By analysing the patch we were able to put together WAF rules to protect cloudflare customers running Drupal.

We identified the type of vulnerability we were dealing within 15 minutes. From here, we were able to deploy rules to block the exploit well before any real attacks were seen.

The exploit

As Drupal's release announcement explains, a site is affected if:

• It has the Drupal 8 RESTful API enabled                                      
• Or it uses one of the 8 modules found to be affected

From looking at the patch we very quickly realised the exploit would be based on deserialization. The option ['allowed_classes' Continue reading

Protection from Struts Remote Code Execution Vulnerability (S2-057)

On August 22 a new vulnerability in the Apache Struts framework was announced. It allows unauthenticated attackers to perform Remote Code Execution (RCE) on vulnerable hosts.

As security researcher Man Yue Mo explained, the vulnerability has similarities with previous Apache Struts vulnerabilities. The Cloudflare WAF already mitigated these so adjusting our rules to handle the new vulnerability was simple. Within hours of the disclosure we deployed a mitigation with no customer action required.

OGNL, again

Apache Struts RCE payloads often come in the form of Object-Graph Navigation Library (OGNL) expressions. OGNL is a language for interacting with the properties and functions of Java classes and Apache Struts supports it in many contexts.

For example, the snippet below uses OGNL to dynamically insert the value "5" into a webpage by calling a function.

<s:property value="%{getSum(2,3)}" />

OGNL expressions can also be used for more general code execution:

${
    #_memberAccess["allowStaticMethodAccess"]=true,
    @java.lang.Runtime@getRuntime().exec('calc')
}

Which means if you can find a way to make Apache Struts execute a user supplied OGNL expression, you've found an RCE vulnerability. Security researchers have found a significant number of vulnerabilities where this was the root cause.

What’s different this time?

The major difference between Continue reading