This article is a part of our Vulnerability Database (back to index)
Cross-Site Request Forgery occurrences in Mattermost Server
An issue was discovered in Mattermost Server before 5.12.0, 5.11.1, 5.10.2, 5.9.2, and 4.10.10. The login page allows CSRF. (2020-06-19, CVE-2019-20865)
An issue was discovered in Mattermost Server before 5.18.0, 5.17.2, 5.16.4, 5.15.4, and 5.9.7. CSRF can sometimes occur via a crafted web site for account takeover attacks. (2020-06-19, CVE-2019-20841)
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.