transfer.go.com, http header injection, cwe-113

HTTP Header Injection in transfer.go.com | Vulnerability Crawler Report

Report generated by CloudScan Vulnerability Crawler at Wed Jan 26 14:49:01 CST 2011.

DORK CWE-79 XSS Report

Summary

Severity:	High
Confidence:	Certain
Host:	http://transfer.go.com
Path:	/cgi/transfer.dll

Issue detail

The value of the goto request parameter is copied into the Location response header. The payload f8e47%0d%0a616636ae67a was submitted in the goto parameter. This caused a response containing an injected HTTP header.

Issue background

HTTP header injection vulnerabilities arise when user-supplied data is copied into a response header in an unsafe way. If an attacker can inject newline characters into the header, then they can inject new HTTP headers and also, by injecting an empty line, break out of the headers into the message body and write arbitrary content into the application's response.

Various kinds of attack can be delivered via HTTP header injection vulnerabilities. Any attack that can be delivered via cross-site scripting can usually be delivered via header injection, because the attacker can construct a request which causes arbitrary JavaScript to appear within the response body. Further, it is sometimes possible to leverage header injection vulnerabilities to poison the cache of any proxy server via which users access the application. Here, an attacker sends a crafted request which results in a "split" response containing arbitrary content. If the proxy server can be manipulated to associate the injected response with another URL used within the application, then the attacker can perform a "stored" attack against this URL which will compromise other users who request that URL in future.

Issue remediation

If possible, applications should avoid copying user-controllable data into HTTP response headers. If this is unavoidable, then the data should be strictly validated to prevent header injection attacks. In most situations, it will be appropriate to allow only short alphanumeric strings to be copied into headers, and any other input should be rejected. At a minimum, input containing any characters with ASCII codes less than 0x20 should be rejected.

Request

GET /cgi/transfer.dll?name=GLOBALNAV_FOOTER_REGISTER&srvc=abc&goto=https://register.go.com/abc/register/registerf8e47%0d%0a616636ae67a&lid=ABCCOMGlobalFooter&lpos=REGISTER HTTP/1.1
Host: transfer.go.com
Accept: */*
Accept-Language: en
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0)
Connection: close

Response

HTTP/1.1 302 OK
Cache-control: no-cache
Pragma: no-cache
Location: https://register.go.com/abc/register/registerf8e47
616636ae67a?lid=ABCCOMGlobalFooter&lpos=REGISTER
Connection: close
X-UA-Compatible: IE=EmulateIE7

Report generated by CloudScan Vulnerability Crawler at Wed Jan 26 14:49:01 CST 2011.