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Who should read this

All Struts 2 developers

Impact of vulnerability

Remote command execution

Maximum security rating

High Critical

Recommendation

Developers should immediately upgrade to Struts 2.3.14.1

Affected Software

Struts 2.0.0 - Struts 2.3.14

Problem

Both the s:url and s:a tag provide an includeParams attribute.

The allowed values for the attribute are:

  1. none - include no parameters in the URL (default)
  2. get - include only GET parameters in the URL
  3. all - include both GET and POST parameters in the URL

A request that included a specially crafted request parameter could be used to inject arbitrary OGNL code into the stack, afterward used as request parameter of an URL Tag or A tag , which will cause a further evaluation.

The second evaluation happens when the URL Tag /A tag tries to resolve every parameters present in the original request.
This lets malicious users put arbitrary OGNL statements into any request parameter (not necessarily managed by the code) and have it evaluated as an OGNL expression to enable method execution and execute arbitrary methods, bypassing Struts and OGNL library protections.

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  1. Open HelloWorld.jsp present in the Struts Blank App and add to one of the url/a tag the following parameter:
    Code Block
     includeParams="all"
    
    Such that the line will be something look like this:
    Code Block
    xml
    xml
    <s:url id="url" action="HelloWorld" includeParams="all">
    
    (it works also with includeParams="get").
  2. Run struts2-blank app
  3. Open the url: http://localhost:8080/example/HelloWorld.action?fakeParam=%25%7B(%23_memberAccess%5B'allowStaticMethodAccess'%5D%3Dtrue)(%23context%5B'xwork.MethodAccessor.denyMethodExecution'%5D%3Dfalse)(%23writer%3D%40org.apache.struts2.ServletActionContext%40getResponse().getWriter()%2C%23writer.println('hacked')%2C%23writer.close())%7D
    (this is the shortened version http://goo.gl/lhlTl)

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