This article is a part of our Vulnerability Database (back to index)
Cross-Site Request Forgery occurrences in Horizon
In OpenNMS Horizon, versions opennms-1-0-stable through opennms-27.1.0-1; OpenNMS Meridian, versions meridian-foundation-2015.1.0-1 through meridian-foundation-2019.1.18-1; meridian-foundation-2020.1.0-1 through meridian-foundation-2020.1.6-1 are vulnerable to CSRF, due to no CSRF protection at `/opennms/admin/userGroupView/users/updateUser`. This flaw allows assigning `ROLE_ADMIN` security role to a normal user. Using this flaw, an attacker can trick the admin user to assign administrator privileges to a normal user by enticing him to click upon an attacker-controlled website. (2021-05-20, CVE-2021-25931)
In OpenNMS Horizon, versions opennms-1-0-stable through opennms-27.1.0-1; OpenNMS Meridian, versions meridian-foundation-2015.1.0-1 through meridian-foundation-2019.1.18-1; meridian-foundation-2020.1.0-1 through meridian-foundation-2020.1.6-1 are vulnerable to CSRF, due to no CSRF protection, and since there is no validation of an existing user name while renaming a user. As a result, privileges of the renamed user are being overwritten by the old user and the old user is being deleted from the user list. (2021-05-20, CVE-2021-25930)
Why Cross-Site Request Forgery can be dangerous
The absence of Anti-CSRF tokens may lead to a Cross-Site Request Forgery attack that can result in executing a specific application action as another logged in user, e.g. steal their account by changing their email and password or silently adding a new admin user account when executed from the administrator account.
The attacker may copy one of your web application forms, e.g. email/password change form.
The webpage will contain a form with the exact set of fields as the original application but with input values already provided and the submit button replaced with a Javascript code causing auto-submission. When the page is accessed the form will be immediately submitted and page contents replaced with a valid content or a redirect to your original application.
One of your application users who is already logged in can be then tricked to navigate to such malicious page e.g. by clicking a link in a phishing email, and the pre-populated form content will be submitted to your application like it would be submitted by your user.