(PT-2009-42) Positive Technologies Security Advisory
Cross-Site Request Forgery in Kayako Support Suite

Vulnerable Software

Kayako Support Suite
Version 3.60.04 stable and possibly earlier

Link:
http://www.kayako.com/

Security Level

Security Level:         Medium
Impact:                      Cross-Site Request Forgery
Attack Vector:          Remote

CVSS v2:
Base Score:     7
Temporal Score: 5.2
Vector:         (AV:N/AC:M/Au:S/C:C/I:P/A:N/E:U/RL:O/RC:C)

CVE:   not assigned

Software Description

Kayako Support Suite is a HelpDesk system.

Vulnerability Description

Positive Technologies Research Team discovered several Cross-Site Request Forgery vulnerabilities in Kayako Support Suite.

The application has insufficient protection against this type of attacks in all operations performed by the administrator and certain privileged user group operations.

This type of attacks simulates a user request to a third party site. This vulnerability is rather widespread because of the peculiarity of the architecture of most web applications. More exactly, many web applications cannot determine for sure whether the request was generated by a valid user or not.

The attack may be conducted to reach the following aims:

1. If the administrator didn’t log off and logs in as a user from a privileged user group, then an attacker can give him a link to a page or attach an html file with malicious code that, once downloaded, will allow the user to perform arbitrary operations with administrator privileges (change the password, e-mail, etc.).

2. If there is a privileged user group and there is no administrator session at the same time, then an attacker can:
- create a user bypassing any checks
- activate a user
- change the e-mail of an arbitrary user
- change the e-mail of the current privileged user group

The vulnerability details are not disclosed.

Solution

Update your software up to the latest version (3.70.01).

Bulletin Status

10/12/2009 - Vendor notified
10/13/2009 - Vendor response
01/19/2010 - The vendor confirmed the vulnerability and issued a workaround decision
02/09/2010 - Requested status update from vendor
04/08/2010 - Public disclosure

Acknowledgements

This vulnerability was discovered by Timur Yunusov (Positive Technologies Research Team)

References

http://www.securitylab.ru/lab/PT-2009-42
http://www.ptsecurity.ru/advisory.asp

Reports on the vulnerabilities previously discovered by Positive Technologies Research Team:

http://www.securitylab.ru/lab/
http://www.ptsecurity.ru/advisory.asp

 

About Positive Technologies

Positive Technologies www.ptsecurity.com is among the key players in the IT security market in Russia.
The principal activities of the company include the development of integrated tools for information security monitoring (MaxPatrol); providing IT security consulting services and technical support; development of the Securitylab en.securitylab.ru leading Russian information security portal.

Among the clients of Positive Technologies, there are more than 40 state enterprises, more than 50 banks and financial organizations, 20 telecommunication companies, more than 40 plant facilities, as well as IT, service and retail companies from Russia, the CIS countries, the Baltic States, China, Ecuador, Germany, Great Britain, Holland, Iran, Israel, Japan, Mexico, the Republic of South Africa, Thailand, Turkey, and the USA.

Positive Technologies is a team of highly skilled developers, advisers and experts with years of vast hands-on experience. The company specialists possess professional titles and certificates; they are the members of various international societies and are actively involved in the IT security field development.