Authentication bypass in CitrusDB

RedTeam found an authentication bypass vulnerability in CitrusDB which can result in complete corruption of the installed CitrusDB application. 

Details
=======

Product: CitrusDB
Affected Version: 0.3.6 (verified), probably <=0.3.6
Immune Version: none (2005-01-30) 
OS affected: all
Security-Risk: very high
Remote-Exploit: yes
Vendor-URL: http://www.citrusdb.org/ 
Vendor-Status: informed 
Advisory-URL: http://www.redteam-pentesting.de/advisories/rt-sa-2005-002
Advisory-Status: public 
CVE: CAN-2005-0408
(https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CAN-2005-0408#)

Introduction
============

Description from vendor:
"CitrusDB is an open source customer database application that uses PHP and a database backend (currently MySQL) to keep track of customer information, services, products, billing, and customer service information." 

CitrusDB uses the same personal cookie for every user at each time for identification.

More Details
============

CitrusDB uses a cookie user_name to determine the name of the user and a cookie id_hash to check if the user_name is valid. The id_hash is a md5 checksum of the username with the string "boogaadeeboo" appended.  Example: 
user_name: admin
id_hash: md5sum("adminboogaadeeboo") = 4b3b2c8666298ae9771e9b3d38c3f26e
An attacker only needs to guess a correct username, "admin" normally will work since it is the default administrator name in CitrusDB. 

Proof of Concept
================

curl -D - --cookie "id_hash=4b3b2c8666298ae9771e9b3d38c3f26e; user_name=admin" http://<targethost>/citrusdb/tools/index.php

Workaround
==========

Change $hidden_hash_var in /citrusdb/include/user.inc.php to a value different than "boogaadeeboo". This way the an attacker needs to acquire a correct cookie to get access.

Fix
===

citusdb should determine a value for $hidden_hash_var at install time ensuring that this value is different.

Security Risk
=============

The security risk is very high because an attacker may gain full control of CitrusDB.

History
=======

2005-02-04 Email sent to author 
2005-02-12 CVE number requested 
2005-02-14 posted as CAN-2005-0408
2009-05-08 Updated Advisory URL

RedTeam
=======

RedTeam is penetration testing group working at the Laboratory for Dependable Distributed Systems at RWTH-Aachen University. You can find more information on the RedTeam Project at http://www.redteam-pentesting.de