Application Security

Go-Based Apps Vulnerable to Attacks Due to URL Parsing Issue

Israeli cloud-native application security testing firm Oxeye discovered that the way URL parsing is implemented in some Go-based applications creates vulnerabilities that could allow threat actors to conduct unauthorized actions.

Eduard Kovacs

August 2, 2022

Go, or Golang, is an open source programming language designed for building reliable and efficient software at scale. Supported by Google, Go is leveraged by some of the world’s largest companies and it’s often used to develop cloud-native apps, including for Kubernetes.

Oxeye researchers have conducted an analysis of Go-based cloud-native applications and discovered an edge case that could have serious implications.

The issue, which they have dubbed ParseThru, is related to unsafe URL parsing. Until version 1.17, Go considered semicolons in the query part of a URL as a valid delimiter. Starting with this version, an error is returned if the URL query contains a semicolon.

Oxeye researchers discovered that if a user-facing application is running on Go 1.17 or later and the associated backend service is running on an earlier version of Go, an attacker can smuggle requests with query parameters that would normally be rejected.

The cybersecurity firm has described the following theoretical attack scenario:

ParseThru URL parsing attack affecting Go applications

The researchers identified several open source projects affected by this behavior. The list includes the Skipper HTTP router and reverse proxy for service composition, the Traefik HTTP reverse proxy and load balancer, and Harbor, a CNCF project designed for securing artifacts and ensuring that container images are free of vulnerabilities and trusted.

Daniel Abeles, one of the Oxeye researchers who discovered the vulnerability, told SecurityWeek that in the case of Harbor, a threat actor could read private, restricted Docker images they would otherwise not be able to access.

Oxeye has reported its findings to impacted applications and their developers have released patches.

Application developers are advised to consider using alternative methods for parsing query strings or ensure that queries containing a semicolon are rejected in order to prevent abuse.

Written By Eduard Kovacs

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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