This article is a part of our Vulnerability Database (back to index)
Cross-Site Request Forgery occurrences in Mahara
Mahara before 20.10.5, 21.04.4, 21.10.2, and 22.04.0 is vulnerable to Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF) because randomly generated tokens are too easily guessable. (2022-04-28, CVE-2022-28892)
Mahara 20.10 is affected by Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF) that allows a remote attacker to remove inbox-mail on the server. The application fails to validate the CSRF token for a POST request. An attacker can craft a module/multirecipientnotification/inbox.php pieform_delete_all_notifications request, which leads to removing all messages from a mailbox. (2021-03-31, CVE-2021-29349)
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.