Magento Patches Command Execution, Local File Read Flaws

January 29, 2019

Magento recently addressed two vulnerabilities that could lead to command execution and local file read, a SCRT security researcher reveals.

Written in PHP, Magento is a popular open-source e-commerce platform that is part of Adobe Experience Cloud. Vulnerabilities in Magento – and any other popular content management systems out there – are valuable to malicious actors, as they could be exploited to impact a large number of users.

In September last year, SCRT's Daniel Le Gall found two vulnerabilities in Magento, both of which could be exploited with low privileges admin accounts, which are usually provided to Marketing users.

The first of the two security bugs is a command execution using path traversal. Exploitation, the researchers reveal, requires the user to be able to create products. The second issue is a local file read that requires the user to be able to create email templates.

The root cause of the first issue is a path traversal, whichLe Gall discoveredin a function that checks if a file that templates can be loaded from is located in certain directories. The faulty function only checks if the provided path begins by a specific directory name, but not if the resolved path is in the whitelisted directories.

Because of the partial checks performed by the function, a path traversal can be called through a Product Design, but only to process .phtml files as PHP code.

Although this is a forbidden extension on most upload forms, one could create a file with "Custom Options," and could allow extensions they want to be uploaded, including phtml. Once ordered, the item is stored to a specific .extension, which allows for command execution, the researcher says.

The second vulnerability was found in email templating, which allows the use of a special directive to load the content of a CSS file into the email. The two functions that are managing this directive are not checking for path traversal characters anywhere and an attacker could inject any file into the email template.

"Creating an email template with the should be sufficient to trigger the vulnerability,"Le Gall says.

The researcher disclosed both of these vulnerabilities in September last year, and a patch released at the end of November (Magento 2.2.7 and 2.1.16 released) addressed both of them. The researcher was awarded a total of $7500 in bug bounty rewards for the findings.