WordPress SQL column truncation vulnerability

imagensecforcepost.png

This vulnerability has been published some days ago where an attacker could create a duplicated “admin” user and recover the legitimate “admin” password. SQL column truncation is an attacking technique whereby an attacker take advance of some kind of mismatch between an application and the database structure used by it.

Let’s have a look to the vulnerable code.

In schema.php in the Wordpress application it is defined the creation of the database table containing users:

CREATE TABLE $wpdb->users (
ID bigint(20) unsigned NOT NULL auto_increment,
user_login varchar(60) NOT NULL default '',

As we can see, the user_login field has a length of 60 bytes. However, the application does not enforce this limitation and allows longer usernames.

An attacker could create a user called “admin[55 spaces]X”. The last “X” is character 61 and therefore will be ignored by the database.

Later in the code, we can see that the user_login field is trim()ed and all the spaces are removed, so it becomes “admin”:

<?php 
if ( strstr($_POST['user_login'], '@') ) {
$user_data = get_user_by_email(trim($_POST['user_login']));
if ( empty($user_data) )
$errors->add('invalid_email', __('<strong>ERROR</strong>: There is no user registered with that email address.'));
} else {
$login = trim($_POST['user_login']);
$user_data = get_userdatabylogin($login);
?>

In summary, this is a very creative vulnerability and an interesting vector of attack.

[1]: http://irk4z.wordpress.com/2008/09/14/sql-column-truncation-vulnerability/

You may also be interested in...

imagensecforcepost.png
Oct. 13, 2019

NetScaler EPA Bypass Burp plugin

This Burp plugin is a fork of the aforementioned code that will listen for “Pre-Authentication Endpoint Analysis” requests and reply to the server that these were passed.

See more
imagensecforcepost.png
Nov. 14, 2012

VMInjector – DLL Injection tool to unlock guest VMs

VMInjector is a tool designed to bypass OS login authentication screens of major operating systems running on VMware Workstation/Player, by using direct memory manipulation.

See more