Squirrelmail: Session hijacking vulnerability, CVE-2008-3663

References

http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2008-3663
http://int21.de/cve/CVE-2008-3663-squirrelmail.html
http://enablesecurity.com/2008/08/11/surf-jack-https-will-not-save-you/
https://www.defcon.org/html/defcon-16/dc-16-speakers.html#Perry

Description

When configuring a web application to use only ssl (e. g. by forwarding all http-requests to https), a user would expect that sniffing and hijacking the session is impossible.

Though, for this to be secure, one needs to set the session cookie to have the secure flag. Else the cookie will be transferred through http if the victim's browser does a single http-request on the same domain.

Squirrelmail does not set that flag. It is fixed in 1.4.16 and above.

Disclosure Timeline

2008-08-12: Vendor contacted
2008-09-23 Published advisory
2008-09-28 Vendor releases fixed 1.4.16

Credits and copyright

This vulnerability was discovered by Hanno Boeck of schokokeks.org webhosting. It's licensed under the creative commons attribution license.

Hanno Boeck, http://www.hboeck.de