Vulnerabilities > CVE-2022-46168 - Privacy Violation vulnerability in Discourse

An attacker creates a very persistent cookie that is then sent by the server to the victim's browser when the victim visits a website. The cookie is stored on the victim's machine in over ten places to include: Standard HTTP Cookies, Local Shared Objects (Flash Cookies), Silverlight Isolated Storage, Storing cookies in RGB values of auto-generated, force-cached, PNGs using HTML5 Canvas tag to read pixels (cookies) back out, Storing cookies in Web History, Storing cookies in HTTP ETags, Storing cookies in Web cache, window.name caching, Internet Explorer userData storage, HTML5 Session Storage, HTML5 Local Storage, HTML5 Global Storage, HTML5 Database Storage via SQLite, among others. When the victim clears the cookie cache via traditional means inside the browser, that operation removes the cookie from certain places but not others. The malicious code then replicates the cookie from all of the places where it was not deleted to all of the possible storage locations once again. So the victim again has the cookie in all of the original storage locations. In other words, failure to delete the cookie in even one location will result in the cookie's resurrection everywhere. The evercookie will also persist across different browsers because certain stores (e.g., Local Shared Objects) are shared between different browsers.

An attacker harvests identifying information about a victim via an active session that the victim's browser has with a social networking site. A victim may have the social networking site open in one tab or perhaps is simply using the "remember me" feature to keep his or her session with the social networking site active. An attacker induces a payload to execute in the victim's browser that transparently to the victim initiates a request to the social networking site (e.g., via available social network site APIs) to retrieve identifying information about a victim. While some of this information may be public, the attacker is able to harvest this information in context and may use it for further attacks on the user (e.g., spear phishing). In one example of an attack, an attacker may post a malicious posting that contains an image with an embedded link. The link actually requests identifying information from the social networking site. A victim who views the malicious posting in his or her browser will have sent identifying information to the attacker, as long as the victim had an active session with the social networking site. There are many other ways in which the attacker may get the payload to execute in the victim's browser mainly by finding a way to hide it in some reputable site that the victim visits. The attacker could also send the link to the victim in an e-mail and trick the victim into clicking on the link. This attack is basically a cross site request forgery attack with two main differences. First, there is no action that is performed on behalf of the user aside from harvesting information. So standard CSRF protection may not work in this situation. Second, what is important in this attack pattern is the nature of the data being harvested, which is identifying information that can be obtained and used in context. This real time harvesting of identifying information can be used as a prelude for launching real time targeted social engineering attacks on the victim.