Vulnerabilities > CVE-2023-36456 - Interpretation Conflict vulnerability in Goauthentik Authentik

047910
CVSS 7.3 - HIGH
Attack vector
NETWORK
Attack complexity
LOW
Privileges required
NONE
Confidentiality impact
LOW
Integrity impact
LOW
Availability impact
LOW
network
low complexity
goauthentik
CWE-436
NVD
Published: 2023-07-06
Updated: 2023-07-13

Summary

authentik is an open-source Identity Provider. Prior to versions 2023.4.3 and 2023.5.5, authentik does not verify the source of the X-Forwarded-For and X-Real-IP headers, both in the Python code and the go code. Only authentik setups that are directly accessible by users without a reverse proxy are susceptible to this. Possible spoofing of IP addresses in logs, downstream applications proxied by (built in) outpost, IP bypassing in custom flows if used. This poses a possible security risk when someone has flows or policies that check the user's IP address, e.g. when they want to ignore the user's 2 factor authentication when the user is connected to the company network. A second security risk is that the IP addresses in the logfiles and user sessions are not reliable anymore. Anybody can spoof this address and one cannot verify that the user has logged in from the IP address that is in their account's log. A third risk is that this header is passed on to the proxied application behind an outpost. The application may do any kind of verification, logging, blocking or rate limiting based on the IP address, and this IP address can be overridden by anybody that want to. Versions 2023.4.3 and 2023.5.5 contain a patch for this issue.

Vulnerable Configurations

Part Description Count
Application
Goauthentik
308

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