full-disclosure - Mis-diagnosed XSS bugs hiding worse issues due to PHP feature

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Message-ID: <53291.217.201.68.230.1143911635.squirrel@webmail.zone-h.fr>
Date: Sun Apr  2 01:56:15 2006
From: admin at zone-h.fr (Siegfried)
Subject: Mis-diagnosed XSS bugs hiding worse issues 
	due to PHP feature

About that xss, it was really a normal xss, like i wrote in my second post
(i respect rgod's work because he always made good analysis and good
advisories). But there are indeed many vulnerabilities that are classified
as XSS while they were much more than a XSS, or a XSS in a PHP error
message.

Those XSS issues are actually vulnerabilities that were fixed in PHP 5.1.2
(i know at least 2 examples: an inclusion error message, a missing
function which name is based on user supplied data).

See also:
http://www.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/securityfocus/bugtraq/2005-10/0040.html

There is also this problem with SQL injection vulnerabilities, everyday we
see a bunch of XSS and SQL injection advisories, but who has the time to
check them all? ..

Siegfried

Le Sam 1 avril 2006 10:11, Steven M. Christey a ?crit :
>
> In a post-disclosure analysis [1] of a security issue announced by
> rgod [2], Siegfried observed that the reported XSS actually originated
> from a file inclusion vulnerability, in which the XSS was reflected
> back from an error message when the file inclusion failed:
>
>>About the xss, it is an xss in the php error message, there are many
>>php functions returning errors without filtering them, anybody noted
>>that?
>
> Yes.
>
> I would greatly appreciate some corroboration from the real PHP/web
> security experts out there on what I'm about to say.  If true, it
> would partly explain why XSS is so rampant in PHP applications.
>
> As I understand it, this behavior is due to an XSS problem in PHP
> itself before 5.1.2 (CVE-2006-0208), as announced in January 2006:
>
>   http://www.php.net/release_5_1_2.php
>
> It's not clear if PHP 4.x was affected.
>
> The XSS happens when display_errors and html_errors are enabled - it
> won't quote the output from raw error messages.
>
> No doubt many so-called XSS errors these days are the result of this
> particular issue in PHP.  They're aren't entirely the application's
> fault, although obviously they indicate the lack of strong input
> validation.
>
> This can hide much more serious vulnerabilities, like file inclusion,
> directory traversal, or SQL injection.  I have mentioned this in the
> past, but now we know why this seems to happen so often.
> (Application-controlled error handlers can still be subject to XSS of
> course, even under a fixed PHP.)
>
> For those who do post-disclosure analysis: there *might* be a
> resultant XSS issue if the researcher claims both XSS and another type
> of bug in the same affected parameter/component, or if the
> researcher's report includes error messages that don't seem to be
> sanitizing XSS-tainted output.
>
> - Steve
>
> [1]
> http://lists.grok.org.uk/pipermail/full-disclosure/2006-March/044756.html
>
> [2] http://retrogod.altervista.org/claroline_174_incl_xpl.html
>