Drupal developers on Wednesday announced the release of versions 7.69, 8.7.11 and 8.8.1, which address several vulnerabilities, including a potentially serious file processing issue.
The most serious of the flaws has been assigned a severity rating of critical, but it’s worth noting that Drupal uses the NIST Common Misuse Scoring System to calculate risk and critical is the second highest rating, after highly critical.
The vulnerability impacts Drupal 7.x, 8.7.x and 8.8.x, and it’s related to the Archive_Tar third-party library used by the content management system (CMS). Archive_Tar is a popular tool designed for handling TAR archive files in PHP.
Roughly one month ago, someone advised Archive_Tar developers to add an option that would allow users to ban symlinks, which are files that contain a reference to another file or folder. Symlinks can be exploited by malicious actors to write arbitrary data, which can lead to privilege escalation.
“For applications where uploaded archives are untrusted, it would be useful to have a way to disallow symlinks. This would effectively protect against exploits that involve archives that point to (and eventually override) system paths,” explained Samuel Mortenson, who reported the issue to Archive_Tar developers.
Archive_Tar developers followed Mortenson’s advice and in early December, with the release of version 1.4.9, they added an option to disallow symlinks.
Since Drupal uses Archive_Tar, the CMS’s developers have determined that some configurations are exposed to attacks, which is why they have now updated the library to version 1.4.9.
According to Drupal, websites are at risk if they are configured to allow the uploading of TAR, TAR.GZ, BZ2 or TLZ files, which are then processed.
The other three vulnerabilities patched this week by Drupal affect versions 8.7.x and 8.8.x, and they have all been rated moderately critical, which is the third highest risk level.
One of these flaws can be exploited to cause a denial-of-service (DoS) condition. Accessing install.php can result in cached data becoming corrupted, which can cause a website to become “impaired” until the caches are rebuilt, Drupal developers said.
Another vulnerability has been described as an access bypass issue related to the Media Library module, which apparently does not properly restrict access to media items in certain configurations.
Finally, there is a weakness related to the fact that the file_save_upload() function in Drupal 8 fails to strip the leading and trailing dot from filenames, as Drupal 7 did. This allows an attacker, for example, to upload a specially crafted .htaccess web server configuration file in order to bypass protections provided by the default .htaccess file.
Related: Vulnerability Allows Hackers to Take Control of Drupal 8 Websites
Related: Phar Vulnerabilities Patched in Drupal, TYPO3
Related: Critical Drupal Vulnerability Allows Remote Code Execution
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.
More from Eduard Kovacs
- Waterfall Security, TXOne Networks Launch New OT Security Appliances
- Hitachi Energy Blames Data Breach on Zero-Day as Ransomware Gang Threatens Firm
- New York Man Arrested for Running BreachForums Cybercrime Website
- Exploitation of Recent Fortinet Zero-Day Linked to Chinese Cyberspies
- Mozilla Patches High-Severity Vulnerabilities With Release of Firefox 111
- Microsoft: 17 European Nations Targeted by Russia in 2023 as Espionage Ramping Up
- Cybercriminals, APT Exploited Telerik Vulnerability in Attacks on US Government Agency
- US Charges Two Men Over Use of Hacked Law Enforcement Database for Doxing
Latest News
- Aembit Scores $16.6M Seed Funding for Workload IAM Technology
- Millions Stolen in Hack at Cryptocurrency ATM Manufacturer General Bytes
- Waterfall Security, TXOne Networks Launch New OT Security Appliances
- Hitachi Energy Blames Data Breach on Zero-Day as Ransomware Gang Threatens Firm
- NBA Notifying Individuals of Data Breach at Mailing Services Provider
- Adobe Acrobat Sign Abused to Distribute Malware
- New York Man Arrested for Running BreachForums Cybercrime Website
- Huawei Has Replaced Thousands of US-Banned Parts With Chinese Versions: Founder
