Serpico Cross-Site Request Forgery

An issue was discovered in Serpico (aka SimplE RePort wrIting and CollaboratiOn tool) 1.3.0. It does not use CSRF Tokens to mitigate against CSRF; it uses the Origin header (which must match the request origin). This is problematic in conjunction with XSS: one can escalate privileges from User level to Administrator. (2020-01-15, CVE-2019-19854)

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.