Software Engineering Institute

CWE-352: Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) - CVE-2017-3187

The dotCMS administrator panel contains a cross-site request forgery (CSRF) vulnerability. An attacker can perform actions with the same permissions as a victim user, provided the victim has an active session and is induced to trigger the malicious request.

CWE-22: Improper Limitation of a Pathname to a Restricted Directory ('Path Traversal') - CVE-2017-3188
When "Bundle" tar.gz archives uploaded to the Push Publishing feature are decompressed, the filenames of its contents are not properly checked, allowing for writing files to arbitrary directories on the file system. These archives may be uploaded directly via the administrator panel, or using the CSRF vulnerability (CVE-2017-3187) described above.

CWE-434: Unrestricted Upload of File with Dangerous Type - CVE-2017-3189
When "Bundle" tar.gz archives uploaded to the Push Publishing feature are decompressed, there are no checks on the types of files which the bundle contains. This vulnerability combined with the path traversal vulnerability above (CVE-2017-3188) can lead to remote command execution with the permissions of the user running the dotCMS application.

An unauthenticated remote attacker may perform actions with the dotCMS administrator panel with the same permissions of a victim user or execute arbitrary system commands with the permissions of the user running the dotCMS application.

The CERT/CC is currently unaware of a practical solution to this problem.

Do not browse to untrusted sites
Administrators can mitigate CSRF vulnerabilities in browser based tools by not browsing to untrusted websites while logged into their account.