Serendipity - Security

Serendipity 1.6.2 released

nospam@example.com (Garvin Hicking) — Wed, 16 May 2012 11:45:47 +0200

UPDATED: 2012-05-22 12:00 to clarify impact.

Good and bad things come in doubles, it seems. We are sorry to inform you that another security issue in Serendipity has been found by the High-Tech Bridge SA Security Research Lab (Advisory HTB23092). This issue has been reported today at 11:27 and we're happy to provide a quick fix for that.

You can either download the full 1.6.2 release, or apply this simple fix to the file include/functions_trackbacks.inc.php: diff on github.

The error here is that input is not properly validated and can be used (when magic_quotes_gpc is off) to inject SQL code to a SQL query; since our DB layer does not execute multiple statements, and the involved SQL query is not used to produce output code. Thanks to Pawel Golen it was made clear to us that this issue can in fact be used to remotely access the database through blind sql injection attacks (this method however is really slow and creates a lot of traffic, since only using 0/1 as a result of the exploit will mean a lot of queries to deduce the content). Thus you should definitely upgrade your installation.

Serendipity is an open-source based product with no specific funding, so we depend on nice people like High-Tech Bridge, Stefan Schurtz, Hanno Böck and all the others of the past to report issues to us. In turn we promise to fix them as quickly and transparently as possible.

Serendipity 1.6.1 released

nospam@example.com (Garvin Hicking) — Tue, 08 May 2012 09:46:00 +0200

Serendipity 1.6.1 has just been released. As usual you can simply download from s9y.org, extract the archive, upload it to your webspace and accept the upgrader when visiting your blog.

This release mainly addresses two security issues found by Stefan Schurtz (thanks a lot, again!). One is a XSS issue in the media database panel, the other an SQL injection in the media database section. Both issues can only be exploited if you are logged in to your blog and you click a specially crafted link. The SQL injection cannot be used to extract sensitive information from the database or delete data.

Either way you are urged to upgrade your Blog to the latest version. Development versions of 2.0 and 1.7 on github have these bugs fixed as well.

Other bugfixes in this version include:

Updated spamblock plugin for better wordfiltering on specific scenarios
Fixed draft/future entries preview links in backend
Fixed an issue where template-specific configuration options were not overwritten by the new global ones

You might also want to check out our quite stable 1.7 development version which uses Smarty3, or even our 2.0 development version which contains major rewrites so that Smarty is used in the backend!

Security fix for flash-based cloud in Freetag plugin

nospam@example.com (Garvin Hicking) — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 09:17:48 +0200

MustLive discovered a HTML-injection vulnerability in the tagcloud.swf Flashfile that the Freetag-Plugin bundles and makes optionally available.

The issue is fixed in version 1.23 of the flashfile, which has now been committed to the Serendipity plugin (in version 3.30).

Since the swf-File is always bundled with the update, it is recommended to update to the latest version of the plugin for all users, or to delete that specific .swf file.

Thanks to MustLive for sharing the information with us.

serendipity_event_freetag: Plugin update, XSS bug

nospam@example.com (Garvin Hicking) — Tue, 31 May 2011 12:00:00 +0200

Thanks to Stefan Schurtz, who reported a XSS issue in the serendipity_event_freetag plugin (SSCHADV2011-004). The issue was fixed in version 3.22 of the plugin, you can fetch the update through Spartacus or download via Spartacus.s9y.org.

The bug was introduced in version 3.20 of the plugin. Users of the plugin should upgrade, as it allows malicious users to trick people into visiting a specially crafted link on your blog to steal cookie login information for example, if you click on such a link.

Important Security Update: Serendipity 1.5.5 released

nospam@example.com (Garvin Hicking) — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 21:12:36 +0100

Serendipity bundles the powerful Xinha WYSIWYG editor to provide its functionality to our users.

Xinha ships with several plugins that utilize PHP scripting for special usage, like the ImageManager or ExtendedFileManager. A 0-day security exploit has been reported available as of today that exploits the functionality of these plugins to upload malicious files to your webspace, to execute foreign code.

Since no official patch has been made on the Xinha side, the Serendipity Team has released an updated version where those active Xinha-Plugins are no longer executable.

If you do not wish to apply the patch to the most recent Serendipity version 1.5.5 you can remove those files:

htmlarea/contrib/php-xinha.php
htmlarea/plugins/ExtendedFileManager/config.inc.php
htmlarea/plugins/FormOperations/formmail.php
htmlarea/plugins/HtmlTidy/html-tidy-logic.php
htmlarea/plugins/ImageManager/config.inc.php
htmlarea/plugins/InsertPicture/InsertPicture.php
htmlarea/plugins/InsertSnippet/snippets.php
htmlarea/plugins/SpellChecker/aspell_setup.php
htmlarea/plugins/SpellChecker/spell-check-logic.php
htmlarea/plugins/SuperClean/tidy.php

The provided functionality is usually not enabled by default, since Serendipity provides its own media file manager.

Future serendipity releases might re-enable these features, once they are safely patched.

To see if you are infected, please check the directories htmlarea/plugins/ImageManager/demo_images and htmlarea/plugins/ExtendedFileManager/demo_images to see if files have been uploaded there. If so, delete the files and check your webspace for other modified files, as well as change your passwords for FTP and SQL access. Please upgrade as soon as possible.

The release can be found on the Serendipity Download page. All serendipity versions from 1.4 to 1.6 (alpha) are affected. 1.6 alpha users should migrate to a recent SVN head checkout or tomorrow's snapshot.

Thanks a lot to Hauser & Wenz for reporting the issue. Serendipity fully acknowledges responsible full disclosure, non-reported 0-day exploits are helping nobody of true OpenSource spirit.

Serendipity 1.5.4 released

nospam@example.com (Garvin Hicking) — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 12:28:28 +0200

Serendipity 1.5.4 has been released and addresses some minor bugfixes as well as a XSS security issue discovered and reported by High-Tech Bridge. The XSS is only exploitable though, if you are using the "Remember me" feature in the Serendipity backend to login. Thanks to the quick notification by the team we were able to fix the issue within 24 hours, as with all past security issues.

The XSS-issue can easily be patched by only replace the file include/functions_config.inc.php with the new file (link), or by applying this patch.

Other bugfixes that come with the new Serendipity 1.5.4 release are:

Fix PHP 5.3.2 parse error in a file, thanks to fyremoon
Fix SQL query statement for deleting a category, which on some DB types (SQlite) might not return "true" and thus not really delete the category.
Include license output in plugin listing
Fix escaping when using ImageMagick to create PDF-thumbnail images
Add new template variable to feed*.tpl files to support new plugins like pubsubhubbub, so that plugins can embed data to the main XML element

The latest release can be found on our SourceForge repository and on the usual place on . To upgrade from any previous Serendipity version, simply extract and upload the new files to your server.

Serendipity 1.5.3 released, Security Issue with Xinha

nospam@example.com (Garvin Hicking) — Mon, 10 May 2010 13:37:00 +0200

Serendipity 1.5.3 has been released, as a security-fix release with no other relevant changes.

A security issue has been discovered by Stefan Esser during the course of the Month of PHP Security. This issue was found in the WYSIWYG-Library Xinha (that Serendipity uses), and affects certain plugins to Xinha (Linker, ImageManager, ExtendedFileManager, InsertSnippet) which can use a dynamic configuration loader. This loader allows to upload file with arbitrary PHP-Code and thus allows remote code execution, even when not logged in to the Xinha/Serendipity backend.

Due to the seriousness of this bug, we urge everyone to upgrade their installations. People who don't want the hassle of a full upgrade and are not using the mentioned Xinha-plugins actively, can simply delete the file htmlarea/contrib/php-xinha.php, which will render the mentioned plugins and exploits useless.

Thanks to Stefan Esser for reporting this issue to us, and making a quick bugfix possible.

Security update for Freetag Plugin

nospam@example.com (Garvin Hicking) — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 09:52:00 +0200

Thanks to Niels Provos we have been informed of a security issue in the Serendipity Freetag plugin (serendipity_event_freetag). Versions up to 3.08 contained a bug that was not properly escaping a GET variable used in an SQL statement, leading to a possible SQL injection attack.

The impact of this is considered to be low, as the query used is only for displaying Meta keywords inside a blog entry, and usual mysql-Client libraries to not allow to execute multiple stacked SQL queries to drop tables etc.

Nevertheless, you should upgrade this plugin version. It is available on Spartacus, or for manual download.

Serendipity Snapshot: New login hashing

nospam@example.com (Garvin Hicking) — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 14:04:00 +0100

Since quite some time, Serendipity uses old-fashioned md5 hashes to secure your passwords for logins to the backend.

Because mechanisms to crack md5 hashes with rainbow tables or even "dictionary hash"-lookups are getting more and more popular, we have decided to finally take the step to raise the serendipity hashing mechanism to something salted, and more secure (SHA1). Even though md5 hashes are still reasonably(!) safe when you use long, randomized passwords, the old-style hashing is a one-way route to hell.

Serendipity has always been had high tributes to backwards compatibility and ease-of-use and ease-of-upgrading, we have decided to take the "soft" upgrade approach. That means, new Serendipity versions will accept your old MD5 login ONCE, and then will use your user-specified password to create the safer hash and store that to the database.

This will help in hypothetical attack situations, where someone might have gotten hand on your hash values stored inside the database, because he will no longer be able to reverse-engineer your original password.

We could need help from any developer or betatester trying out the new functionality. Upgrading to the latest snapshot (get it from the s9y nightly downloads) with Serendipity 1.5-alpha2 will deploy the necessary database upgrades. Note that the one-time MD5-login is only possible in the first 6 months after you performed the installation of this serendipity version (through a saved timestamp in the database), and after that timespan, you can no longer login with the old password and must reset your password through the Administrator (or manual means, if you are the administrator).

Once you perform the update (do not try this on production blogs currently), everything should continue as usual. If it does not, please report your exact problems here or in the Forums. It is suggested that once you have the new serendipity version you change your password, so that nobody that might have already gotten your old md5 hash can use the reverse-engineered password to login again with the new hash created from the same original password.

Feedback is appreciated. The current mechanism is subject to change and currently more a proof-of-concept - feedback will most definitely lead to improvement. :-)

Serendipity 1.3.1 released

nospam@example.com (Garvin Hicking) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 10:37:00 +0200

Serendipity 1.3.1 has been released. This is a bugfix and security related release, basically adressing a potential XSS issue within the Top Referrers plugin as well as hypothetical XSS issues with the installer.

This release also adresses some basic PostgreSQL8 related problems, because implicit type casts have been removed from this version, causing breakage with several Serendipity core features. The fix for this is only partial and will still happen in (less common) functions of Serendipity. There is no ultimate solution to this because implicit type casts are required for certain entryproperty operations. Maybe the PostgreSQL8 team will think about if implicit type casts are not also quite helpful. ;-)

The only new feature addition is the exposition of a new smarty {serendipity_getImageSize} function.

This upgrade is recommended for users that use the Top Referrers plugin and new installations of Serendipity. Many thanks to Hanno Böck, once again, for reporting (and fixing) the two XSS issues (CVE-2008-1385 and CVE-2008-1386)!

You can find the new release on the s9y.org download page. Upgrade by simply uploading the deflated archive files to your webspace.

Serendipity 1.3 released (addresses security)

nospam@example.com (Garvin Hicking) — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 10:11:50 +0100

Serendipity 1.3 has finally been released. The new release is mainly a feature consolidation release, but also contains XSS security fixes:

The karma rating plugin has been upgraded to support nice, CSS-based rating graphics (see this post) and an overall rehaul on the its coding.
Make the Spartacus plugin be able to use FTP upload, a workaround for SafeMode PHP restrictions. Also add a remote backend for plugin update checks.
An importer for phpNuke and lifetype has been added.
Support for pingbacks has been improved a lot. Trackbacks can now be blocked based on Sender IP checks.
Add better CSS styling for some internal plugins and the embedding of images. Also made the Remote-RSS plugin to be capable of Smarty-Templating.
Increased Smarty templating features for the {serendipity_fetchPrintEntries} function, to be able to check for entry properties.
Add support for SQRelay.
Minor CSS and graphic updates to the Bulletproof template.

The full list of 41 changes to this release are documented within the NEWS file.

Regarding Security, the bundled Smarty library has been updated to version 2.6.19 and adresses an issue in environments where the PHP security mode is required. Also, the new Serendipity release contains tighter backend XSS checks so that environments with untrusted authors can be more secure - many thanks to Hanno Böck for addressing this. Most importantly, an issue with XSS attacks within received trackbacks has been discovered by Peter Hüwe and was fixed.

The update is easy as usual, and recommended for Serendipity users - especially if you do not regularly moderate or check your incoming trackbacks.

Upgrade pointers can be found in the FAQ and is as easy as just to upload the new files.

Have fun!

Freetag plugin updated to prevent XSS

nospam@example.com (Garvin Hicking) — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 14:49:00 +0100

The Freetag plugin has been updated to version 2.96 to fix a possible XSS to the tagcloud output.

XSS attacks can be used by visitors to display foreign HTML or JavaScript to visitors of the blog, if they visit specially crafted URLs. This attack basically allows for cookie stealing.

Users of the freetag plugin should upgrade to the latest version; upgrading via Spartacus-Plugin or Spartacus.s9y.org is just a matter of a few minutes. Thanks to Alex from Bitsploit.de for reporting this issue to us.

Serendipity 1.2.1 released

nospam@example.com (Garvin Hicking) — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 16:33:52 +0100

Serendipity 1.2 has been well received by the community, there were only very few minor bugreports. Those have been addressed in the Serendipity 1.2.1 maintenance release, available now.

The new Serendipity version also includes some new Bulletproof Theme options (user-customized stylesheets) and addresses some very minor browser quirks. If you're using Bulletproof, it is suggested you perform the update.

Also this new version addresses a security issue in the Remote RSS sidebar plugin (reported by Hanno Böck), which did not properly treat links coming from an RSS feed, which could lead to possible XSS attack vectors, if you are showing foreign feeds that might distribute malicious content to you. If you're using this plugin with an unsafe RSS feed, you should upgrade Serendipity.

Serendipity 1.2.1 features a new WPXRSS importer and can import the new WordPress 2.3 database structure All bug fixes have also been applied to our current 1.3-release tree. This release currently features some new Smarty-Templating convenience features, a remote spartacus version information interface, full pingback support, a LifeType blog importer and support of SQLRelay.

Upgrading Serendipity is very easy, have a look at the FAQ. The new version is available on the Serendipity download page.

Enjoy Serendipity and have a nice Christmas time!

Serendipity 1.2 released

nospam@example.com (Garvin Hicking) — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 13:37:00 +0200

The Serendipity Team is proud to present the final release and immediate availability of Serendipity 1.2.

This release is a feature consolidation release and focuses on small usability improvements, a shiny new template (bulletproof) as well as backend templating and backend login mechanisms as well as some tighter security restrictions.

Some more changes in depth are:

Templates: The new bulletproof template is an awesome example to show off Serendipity's cool template options. This template allows you to easily configure the look of your Serendipity site: Place navigation links, choose sidebar layouts, indicate if you want to use/show trackbacks and comments, pick your custom header image or even custom colorsets. Don Chambers, Matthias Mees and David Cummins as well as other contributors have worked very hard on this template that provides an awesome, unified template structure. Go to their site at http://s9y-bulletproof.com to check out the details!
Templates: The admin backend (overview page and entry editor) can now be styled via Smarty and gives you the full flexibility to make a custom look of the backend. Plus, more CSS classes have been added to the default admin theme that make CSS-only changes much easier. Templates now also can have large preview images by clicking on their thumbnail.
Usability: Moved the problematic option to withdraw your own privileges from personal configuration to the user configuration panel.
Feature: Added SQLite3 and PDO:PostgreSQL support.
Feature: Allow to configure whether article overviews for a certain category should include articles of subcategories or not.
Performance: Improved SQL performance for archive overview generation and permalink lookups.
Plugins: Plugins can now hook in much earlier to make external authentication easier (like trough the OpenID plugin).
Spam: Enhanced the spamblock plugin with captcha previews, .htaccess generation and some more options.
Security: Stronger autologin cookie encryption and template option handling, thanks (once again) to Stefan Esser. Proper session fixation prevention, thanks to David Vieira-Kurz.
Bugfix: Sending pingbacks now properly works.
Bugfix: The Track-Exits plugin now properly tracks links in conjunction with the caching of the entryproperties plugin.

The full list of changes can be found in the NEWS-file of the release.

You can download the new release as always on the Serendipity homepage at http://www.s9y.org/3.html. Updating is easy: Just upload the new files, visit your Serendipity installation and let the upgrader do the rest.

After the upgrade you might want to purge your browser's cookies (due to the new authentication mechanism of Serendipity 1.2) to prevent login problems. Detailed upgrade instructions can be found in the FAQ on our website.

Enjoy Serendipity, and thanks to everyone who participated in the release process!

For the team,
Garvin.

Serendipity 1.1.4 released, security bug in entryproperties plugin

nospam@example.com (Garvin Hicking) — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 11:14:34 +0200

Thanks to Erich Schubert, we were made aware of a bug and security issue in the Plugin Extended properties for entries. Since this plugin is delivered with the core release, we have created a new Serendipity release for both the current stable 1.1 version tree, as well as a new 1.2 beta version.

Serendipity Users that are using the mentioned plugin do not need to upgrade the full release, they can just fetch the updated version of the plugin through this direct link. Put that updated file into your plugins/ serendipity_event_entryproperties/ serendipity_event_entryproperties.php file.

The actual bug was, that people were able to deliver custom entryproperties settings to the Serendipity Frontend via a HTTP-Request, which made them able to bypass a possibly used passwort protection. Any other restriction of viewability of entries done via category read-privileges were not affected, though.

Bottom line is: If you are using password protection for entries, this security update is mandatory for you. Also if you were generally using the entryproperties plugin (which is not installed by default in Serendipity), you are urged to update your plugin. Only people not using this plugin need not care about this issue.

You can download the new full releases as always on the Serendipity download page.