An update released last week for Apache CouchDB patched critical vulnerabilities that could have been exploited by malicious actors for privilege escalation and code execution on a significant number of installations.
CouchDB is a document-oriented open source database management system and it’s currently the 28th most popular out of the more than 300 systems tracked by DB-Engines. One of the projects using CouchDB is npm, a package manager for JavaScript and the world’s largest software registry.
Researcher Max Justicz discovered a CouchDB vulnerability while looking for bugs on the server responsible for distributing npm packages, registry.npmjs.org. The registry serves nearly 3.5 billion package downloads every week, according to the npm website.
The flaw identified by Justicz, tracked as CVE-2017-12635, could have been exploited by an attacker with non-admin privileges to obtain administrator rights and ultimately execute arbitrary code.
“Due to differences in CouchDB’s Erlang-based JSON parser and JavaScript-based JSON parser, it is possible to submit _users documents with duplicate keys for `roles` used for access control within the database, including the special case `_admin` role, that denotes administrative users,” CouchDB developers said in an advisory.
In the case of the npm registry, Justicz believes that exploitation of the vulnerability could have allowed an attacker to modify packages served to users. However, the researcher did not attempt to exploit the vulnerability against npm’s production servers.
While analyzing CVE-2017-12635, a member of the CouchDB security team discovered CVE-2017-12636, a flaw that could have been exploited in combination with the privilege escalation bug to execute arbitrary shell commands on the server.
“CouchDB administrative users can configure the database server via HTTP(S). Some of the configuration options include paths for operating system-level binaries that are subsequently launched by CouchDB. This allows a CouchDB admin user to execute arbitrary shell commands as the CouchDB user, including downloading and executing scripts from the public internet,” CouchDB’s advisory explains.
The vulnerabilities were patched last week with the release of versions 2.1.1 and 1.7.0/1.7.1, and CouchDB developers believe all users have already installed the updates. The details of the flaws were made public only a week after the release of the updates to give users time to apply the patches.
Related: Ransack Campaigns Target Hadoop and CouchDB
Related: MongoDB Tightens Security Amid New Database Attacks
Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a contributing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.
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