Administration Console authentication bypass in openfire xmppserver
An important security issue affects a range of versions of Openfire, the cross-platform real-time collaboration server based on the XMPP protocol that is created by the Ignite Realtime community.
Impact
Openfire's administrative console (the Admin Console), a web-based application, was found to be vulnerable to a path traversal attack via the setup environment. This permitted an unauthenticated user to use the unauthenticated Openfire Setup Environment in an already configured Openfire environment to access restricted pages in the Openfire Admin Console reserved for administrative users.
Cause
Path traversal protections were already in place to protect against exactly this kind of attack, but didn’t defend against certain non-standard URL encoding for UTF-16 characters, that were not supported by the embedded webserver that was in use at the time.
A later upgrade of the embedded webserver included support for non-standard URL encoding of UTF-16 characters. The path traversal protections in place in Openfire were not updated to include protection against this new encoding.
Openfire's API defines a mechanism for certain URLs to be excluded from web authentication (this, for example, is used for the login page). This mechanism allows for wildcards to be used, to allow for flexible URL pattern matching.
The combination of the wildcard pattern matching and path traversal vulnerability allows a malicious user to bypass authentication requirements for Admin Console pages.
Affected versions
This vulnerability affects all versions of Openfire that have been released since April 2015, starting with version 3.10.0. The problem has been patched in Openfire release 4.7.5 and 4.6.8, and further improvements will be included in the yet-to-be released first version on the 4.8 branch (which is expected to be version 4.8.0).
Problem Reproduction
To test if an instance of Openfire is affected, follow these steps. Open a browser in incognito mode, or otherwise ensure that there is no authenticated session with the Openfire admin console. Open the following URL (possibly modified for the hostname of the server that is running Openfire):
``http://localhost:9090/setup/setup-s/%u002e%u002e/%u002e%u002e/log.jsp``
If this shows part of the openfire logfiles, then the instance of Openfire is affected by this vulnerability. Note that different versions of Openfire will show a different layout. Newer versions of Openfire can be expected to show log files on a dark background, while older versions will show a largely white page. (Depending on the content of the log file, this page might be empty, apart from a header!)
If there's a redirect to the login page, the instance is likely unaffected.
Problem Resolution
The problem has been patched in [Openfire release 4.7.5 and 4.6.8](https://www.igniterealtime.org/downloads/#openfire), and further improvements will be included in the yet-to-be released first version on the 4.8 branch (which is expected to be version 4.8.0).
- In Openfire 4.6.8, 4.7.5 and 4.8.0, Path Traversal pattern detection has been improved to include detection of non-standard URL encodings, preventing any non UTF-8 characters.
- In Openfire 4.6.8, 4.7.5 and 4.8.0, a new configuration property (
adminConsole.access.allow-wildcards-in-excludes) is introduced that controls the permissibility of using wildcards in URL-patterns that define exclusions to authentication. - In Openfire 4.6.8, 4.7.5 and 4.8.0, the existing value that uses a wildcard in URL-patterns that define exclusions to authentication has been replaced by values that do not depend on a wildcard.
- In Openfire 4.6.8, 4.7.5 and 4.8.0, Setup-specific URL-patterns that define exclusions to authentication are no longer active after the setup process has finished.
- In Openfire 4.8.0, the embedded webserver will be updated to a version that no longer supports the non-standard URL encoding of UTF-16 characters.
- In Openfire 4.8.0, the embedded webserver that serves the Openfire administrative console will bind to the loopback network interface by default.
Be aware that the new configuration properties can interfere with the functionality of certain Openfire plugins. This is especially true for plugins that bind a (web)endpoint to the embedded webserver that serves the Openfire administrative console, like current versions of the REST API plugin do. For these plugins to remain functional and/or reachable, it might be required to toggle the property adminConsole.access.allow-wildcards-in-excludes to true, and to avoid binding the embedded webserver to the loopback network interface only.
When your server uses older versions of the following plugins, make sure to upgrade them:
- [Random Avatar plugin](https://www.igniterealtime.org/projects/openfire/plugin-archive.jsp?plugin=randomavatar), update to version 1.1.0 or later.
- [Monitoring Service plugin](https
