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Cross-Site Request Forgery occurrences in Nodebb
A vulnerability, which was classified as problematic, was found in NodeBB up to 2.5.7. This affects an unknown part of the file /register/abort. The manipulation leads to cross-site request forgery. It is possible to initiate the attack remotely. Upgrading to version 2.5.8 is able to address this issue. The name of the patch is 2f9d8c350e54543f608d3d4c8e1a49bbb6cdea38. It is recommended to upgrade the affected component. The associated identifier of this vulnerability is VDB-213555. (2022-11-13, CVE-2022-3978)
NodeBB Forum Software is powered by Node.js and supports either Redis, MongoDB, or a PostgreSQL database. Due to an unnecessarily strict conditional in the code handling the first step of the SSO process, the pre-existing logic that added (and later checked) a nonce was inadvertently rendered opt-in instead of opt-out. This re-exposed a vulnerability in that a specially crafted Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) attack could theoretically take over another user account during the single sign-on process. The issue has been fully patched in version 1.17.2. (2022-09-02, CVE-2022-36076)
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.