Tag Archives: Bad Design

A case study in bad design: PHP Generator for MySQL

Welcome to the second installment of the “case study in bad design”-series, where I talk about generally horrible design in code, security or user experience. Todays subject is the PHP Generator for MySQL software by SQL Maestro (whose website will present you with a self-signed certificate for *.magicshoes.net if you try to access it via SSL, so you at least have to give them credit for creativity in that area).

PHP Generator for MySQL is a software that allows non-programmers to create web-frontends to their MySQL-Databases. It does a comparatively good job and provides some decent options, although the UI is somewhat cluttered and unintuitive, and the error reporting in places nonexistant. I was required to use it (as opposed to writing something myself) during my last employment with an institute at my university.

The story begins in July 2012, when I noticed that the code generated by PHP Generator had multiple vulnerabilities to Cross-Site scripting, allowing me to steal the login cookie (which, for good measure, contained the password in clear text, even if it was stored as a hash in the database). I cursed, wrote up some proof-of-concept code and reported the vulnerability to the devs.

A few weeks later, a new version of PHP Generator was released, fixing one of the two Cross-Site scripting holes I reported. They never responded to my mail and never fixed the second Cross-Site scripting hole. So, a year almost to the day later, I sent a follow-up mail, reminding them about the holes I reported, reporting another hole and setting a deadline of two weeks, after which I would apply for a CVE and publish the vulnerability. That got their attention and they responded within a day and got a new build out a few days later, fixing the vulnerabilities (and refusing to credit me in the changelog for reporting these issues, but hey, whatever).

A few days ago, I took another pass at the code and found another vulnerability (HTML stored in the database would be evaluated when displayed on the website), complaining that they were now using unsalted hashes of the password for authentication in the cookies (instead of session IDs completely unrelated to the password, which would be a better practice) and, after past experiences, setting a deadline of a week for a reply. Once again, they replied within a day.

Appearently, evaluating HTML from the database was a feature and not a bug. A feature that was on by default and could be disabled on a “per-input” basis. Whoever thought that was a good idea? Every “feature” that opens up the possibility for a security hole as big as stored XSS should either be completely removed or be off by default, to be enabled manually and with a big message box warning about the security implications. To make matters worse, the state of this setting seems to not be saved in the project file, leading to compatibility problems if the default value was changed (and I have no idea how they would make this state persist over restarts of the program if they save the setting nowhere…).

As for the proper session management, they claim to be working on something. They also may add salted hashes, but have not fully committed on that, citing possible compatibility issues.

They closed their mail with a statement that blew my mind:

By the way, we have never received any security related complaints from other PHP Generator users, so probably there is no real threat.

I’m not going to comment further on this statement, as anyone with at least a rudimentary understanding of security should be able to see what is wrong with this.

PHP Generator for MySQL starts at $99 for a single, non-commercial license without upgrades. I would think that you could expect more interest in the security of their customers for that.

A case study in bad design. Todays subject: the Deutsche Bahn

Welcome to the first installment of the new series “a case study in bad design“, which will probably be an ongoing series unless something very surprising happens (namely, people stopping to write horrible code).

Todays subject is the homepage of the german railways corporation, the Deutsche Bahn. (And just setting this link revealed another faux pas, namely that their SSL certificate is only valid for www.bahn.de, not for bahn.de without the leading www).

Everything began with my mother (which is, in a way, not surprising at all, but in that case I am not talking about my birth). She regularily takes the train to Bremen, and had set up a profile for her usual passenger settings (economy or first class, which kind of seat, that sort of thing) in her bahn.de-Account. She noticed her profile repeatedly disappearing, which, at some point, made her so angry she wrote a mail to the people responsible for the website.

They responded with some seemingly senseless information about her browser not allowing cookies. But since no sensible person would store those presets in a cookie if you have a perfectly good user account to store it in, so that was obviously bullshit, right?

Right?

(Checks title of blog post) ah, damn.

A quick check turned up that the travel profile was indeed stored in a cookie. Which would have been bad enough as it was, considering that this profile…

  1. …would be nice to have on more than once PC without setting it up seperately
  2. …is user specific and, subsequently, has no business being in a cookie instead of a database in the first place
  3. …is something that does not change all too often, which makes putting it into a cookie even more stupid than it already is

Well, we now know that this information is stored in a cookie. Then again, this does not explain the random disappearence of it. That is, until you check the cookie information.

Yes, the cookie is valid for a whooping 10 days! This means that every time you don’t visit bahn.de for 10 or more days, you will loose all your preset profiles. Who exactly thought that this was a good idea? Because that person was wrong. As an added bonus, the cookie is not deleted if you log out, so if you, for some reason, create a profile on a public computer, you are leaking your travelling preferences (that’s probably not a big deal, but completely unnecessary).

But, while we’re at it, let’s play around with that cookie. Maybe we can find some Cross-Site scripting (considering all the places I have already found it, it would not surprise me to find it here). Quickly add some quotation marks, just to see what happens, aaaaand…

Obviously.

A quick trip to the source code (a mere 3000 lines of horribly indented HTML and Javascript) reveals a bunch of JavaScript imports. A glance at the *.min.js-files, followed by a curse, followed by the awesomeness that is http://jsbeautifier.org/, revealed somewhat readable Javascript code, containing gems like “b && (a = b)” (a shorthand for “if (b) a = b;”, as it seems) and wonderful “for”-statements like the following:
for (var f = c, c = d, e = void 0, e = void 0, g = [], f = f.substring(4); 0 < f.length && 0 != f.indexOf("]#");)
Appearently, separating statements in a conditional with commata makes them evaluate one after another, and the last statements result is used to check if the conditions of the conditional are fulfilled. I especially love the double assignment of e = void 0.

I will not torture you (or me) with the whole >12 000 lines of Code, but rest assured that it does not get better. In the end, I gave up on finding the cause for the lifelock that occured after my modifications to the cookie, seeing as I am not likely to be paid for this crap and my pain resistance is not high enough for this single-letter variable bullshit. I’ll notify them about it anyway, although I am not sure what (if anything) will come of it.

Adventures in base64, or: How not to design your confirmation links

I recently applied for a room at a student housing complex. After finishing up my online application, I got a confirmation link. I clicked it, checked that everything was fine, and closed it. I then reopened it because the URL had caught my eye. Slightly modified for privacy:

https://[...]/xyz.html?ID=MTIzNHxEb2V8Sm9obnwxOTkwLTAxLTAxCg==

Now, if you’ve been playing around with “dd if=/dev/urandom | base64” like I have, you will see the patterns that imply a base64 encoded string in this URL. So, I quickly copied the ID and decoded it (as I said, I changed the ID around a bit to avoid disclosing personal information).

$ echo MTIzNHxEb2V8Sm9obnwxOTkwLTAxLTAxCg== | base64 -d
1234|Doe|John|1990-01-01

Sooo. Well, that’s not very secure, is it? Give me a confirmation link which I know how to build and only have to guess one part of, which is probably automatically incrementing. I can work with that. But then again, why would I want to fake registrations to a student housing complex? Let’s keep digging.

$ echo "1235|Doe|John|1990-01-01" | base64
MTIzNXxEb2V8Sm9obnwxOTkwLTAxLTAxCg==

Let’s enter that changed ID into the URL, and…

Your Application could not be confirmed: The application was not found in the database (Applicant_ID:1235, Surname:Doe, Name:John, DateOfBirth:1990-01-01)

Oh well. Okay, let’s at least check for Cross-Site scripting, maybe we can find something…

$ echo "<script type="text/javascript">alert('xss');</script>|Herp|De Derp|1337-42-42" | base64
PHNjcmlwdCB0eXBlPSd0ZXh0L2phdmFzY3JpcHQnPmFsZXJ0KCd4c3MnKTs8L3NjcmlwdD58SGVycHxEZSBEZXJwfDEzMzctNDItNDIK

Enter this into the URL, and…

Your Application could not be confirmed: You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near 'text/javascript'>alert('xss');' and Surname='Herp' and DateOfBirth='1337-' at line 1

Yikes. At this point, I backed the hell off, because we have some pretty strict laws about this stuff in Germany. SQL injections are not to be taken lightly, so I quickly whipped up an eMail to the organization and explained the problem to them. I received a lot of silence, and after a few days, I called them up and asked if they had received my mail. They had, and were working on it.

Almost two weeks passed, and the hole was still there, so I called again and asked for the person in charge of the homepage. A brief talk revealed that they had passed the issue on to their vendor, who was, appearently, not very good with providing delivery dates. I asked if I could release this blog entry, and they asked for more time, which I agreed to.

Today, I received an eMail stating that the hole had been fixed. I double checked it, and appearently, it was indeed fixed. I also received permission to release this blog entry. Appearently, the system was in use not only at this specific institution, but also in some other institutions (who have been notified about the need to update, I hope).

All in all, except for the long periods of waiting, it was a pleasent experience. The people at the institution were friendly and understood the dangers of the issue. If everyone would react as quickly and professionally as they did, the web would probably be a more secure place. The reaction time of the vendor could be improved though, taking almost a month to deliver a fix for a critical security issue that could be fixed by changing approximately one line of code is not acceptable.