Vulnerabilities > CVE-2023-22735 - Interpretation Conflict vulnerability in Zulip Server 20230109

047910
CVSS 4.6 - MEDIUM
Attack vector
NETWORK
Attack complexity
LOW
Privileges required
LOW
Confidentiality impact
LOW
Integrity impact
LOW
Availability impact
NONE
network
low complexity
zulip
CWE-436
NVD
Published: 2023-02-07
Updated: 2023-11-07

Summary

Zulip is an open-source team collaboration tool. In versions of zulip prior to commit `2f6c5a8` but after commit `04cf68b` users could upload files with arbitrary `Content-Type` which would be served from the Zulip hostname with `Content-Disposition: inline` and no `Content-Security-Policy` header, allowing them to trick other users into executing arbitrary Javascript in the context of the Zulip application. Among other things, this enables session theft. Only deployments which use the S3 storage (not the local-disk storage) are affected, and only deployments which deployed commit 04cf68b45ebb5c03247a0d6453e35ffc175d55da, which has only been in `main`, not any numbered release. Users affected should upgrade from main again to deploy this fix. Switching from S3 storage to the local-disk storage would nominally mitigate this, but is likely more involved than upgrading to the latest `main` which addresses the issue.

Vulnerable Configurations

Part Description Count
Application
Zulip
1

Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE)

Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification (CAPEC)

  • HTTP Request Splitting
    HTTP Request Splitting (also known as HTTP Request Smuggling) is an attack pattern where an attacker attempts to insert additional HTTP requests in the body of the original (enveloping) HTTP request in such a way that the browser interprets it as one request but the web server interprets it as two. There are several ways to perform HTTP request splitting attacks. One way is to include double Content-Length headers in the request to exploit the fact that the devices parsing the request may each use a different header. Another way is to submit an HTTP request with a "Transfer Encoding: chunked" in the request header set with setRequestHeader to allow a payload in the HTTP Request that can be considered as another HTTP Request by a subsequent parsing entity. A third way is to use the "Double CR in an HTTP header" technique. There are also a few less general techniques targeting specific parsing vulnerabilities in certain web servers.
  • HTTP Response Smuggling
    An attacker injects content into a server response that is interpreted differently by intermediaries than it is by the target browser. To do this, it takes advantage of inconsistent or incorrect interpretations of the HTTP protocol by various applications. For example, it might use different block terminating characters (CR or LF alone), adding duplicate header fields that browsers interpret as belonging to separate responses, or other techniques. Consequences of this attack can include response-splitting, cross-site scripting, apparent defacement of targeted sites, cache poisoning, or similar actions.
  • HTTP Request Smuggling
    HTTP Request Smuggling results from the discrepancies in parsing HTTP requests between HTTP entities such as web caching proxies or application firewalls. Entities such as web servers, web caching proxies, application firewalls or simple proxies often parse HTTP requests in slightly different ways. Under specific situations where there are two or more such entities in the path of the HTTP request, a specially crafted request is seen by two attacked entities as two different sets of requests. This allows certain requests to be smuggled through to a second entity without the first one realizing it.

References