Advisory: Endeca Latitude Cross-Site Request Forgery

RedTeam Pentesting discovered a Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)
vulnerability in Endeca Latitude. Using this vulnerability, an attacker
might be able to change several different settings of the Endeca
Latitude instance or disable it entirely.


Details
=======

Product: Endeca Latitude
Affected Versions: 2.2.2, potentially others
Fixed Versions: N/A
Vulnerability Type: Cross-Site Request Forgery
Security Risk: low
Vendor URL: N/A
Vendor Status: decided not to fix
Advisory URL: https://www.redteam-pentesting.de/advisories/rt-sa-2013-002
Advisory Status: published
CVE:  CVE-2014-2399
CVE URL: https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2014-2399


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

Endeca Latitude is an enterprise data discovery platform for advanced,
yet intuitive, exploration and analysis of complex and varied data.
Information is loaded from disparate source systems and stored in a
faceted data model that dynamically supports changing data. This
integrated and enriched data is made available for search, discovery,
and analysis via interactive and configurable applications.

(from the vendor's homepage)


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

Endeca Latitude offers administrators the ability to perform different
administrative and configuration operations by accessing URLs.
These URLs are not secured by a randomly generated token and therefore
are prone to Cross-Site Request Forgery attacks.

For example by accessing the URL http://example.com/admin?op=exit an
administrator can shut down the Endeca Latitude instance. Several other
URLs exist (as documented at [1] and [2]) which can be used to trigger
operations such as flushing cashes or changing the logging settings.


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

An attacker might prepare a website, which can trigger arbitrary
functionality (see [1] and [2]) of an Endeca Latitude instance if
someone opens the attacker's website in a browser that can reach Endeca
Latitude.  An easy way to implement this is to embed a hidden image into
an arbitrary website which uses the corresponding URL as its source:

<img src="http://example.com/admin?op=exit" style="display:hidden" />
<img src="http://example.com/config?op=log-disable" style="display:hidden" />
[...]


Workaround
==========

The vendor did not update the vulnerable software, but recommends to
configure all installations to require mutual authentication using TLS
certificates for both servers and clients, while discouraging users from
installing said client certificates in browsers.


Fix
===

Not available. The vendor did not update the vulnerable software to
remedy this issue.


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

The vulnerability can enable attackers to be able to interact with an
Endeca Latitude instance in different ways. Possible attacks include the
changing of settings as well as denying service by shutting down a
running instance. Attackers mainly benefit from this vulnerability if
the instance is not already available to them, but for example only to
restricted IP addresses or after authentication. Since this makes it
harder to identify potential target systems and the attack mainly allows
to disturb the service until it is re-started, the risk of this
vulnerability is considered to be low.


Timeline
========

2013-10-06 Vulnerability identified
2013-10-08 Customer approved disclosure to vendor
2013-10-15 Vendor notified
2013-10-17 Vendor responded that investigation/fixing is in progress
2014-02-24 Vendor responded that bug is fixed and scheduled for a future
           CPU
2014-03-13 Vendor responded with additional information about a
           potential workaround
2014-04-15 Vendor releases Critical Patch Update Advisory with little
           information on the proposed fix
2014-04-16 More information requested from vendor
2014-05-02 Vendor responds with updated information
2014-06-25 Advisory released


References
==========

[1] http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E29220_01/mdex.222/admin/toc.htm#List%20of%20administrative%20operations
[2] http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E29220_01/mdex.222/admin/toc.htm#List%20of%20supported%20logging%20variables


RedTeam Pentesting GmbH
=======================

RedTeam Pentesting offers individual penetration tests, short pentests,
performed by a team of specialised IT-security experts. Hereby, security
weaknesses in company networks or products are uncovered and can be
fixed immediately.

As there are only few experts in this field, RedTeam Pentesting wants to
share its knowledge and enhance the public knowledge with research in
security related areas. The results are made available as public
security advisories.

More information about RedTeam Pentesting can be found at
https://www.redteam-pentesting.de.


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