Creative Solutions Contact Form Generator, Creative form builder for WordPress (versions up to 2.6.), recently discovered a blatant SQL Injection vulnerability. This critical vulnerability, identified as CVE-2023-35911, allows attackers to execute arbitrary SQL queries by injecting malicious code into the application.

What is SQL Injection?

SQL Injection is a common web security vulnerability that allows an attacker to interfere with the queries an application makes to its database. Attackers can exploit this vulnerability to read sensitive data from the database, modify this data, or even execute administrative operations on the application.

Understanding CVE-2023-35911

CVE-2023-35911 describes an SQL Injection issue in Creative Solutions Contact Form Generator. An attacker can inject malicious SQL code into the application's vulnerable query, leading to potential data breaches, unauthorized access to sensitive data, or privileged access to the application.

Exploit Details

By exploiting this vulnerability, an attacker can successfully bypass authentication mechanisms, access unauthorized data, or even gain administrative access to the application. To exploit this vulnerability, the attacker simply needs to supply malicious SQL code through the application's user input fields, which are not properly sanitized.

For an attacker to successfully exploit this vulnerability, they need to identify an affected application version and supply malicious SQL code in the user input field.

Code Snippet

The following code snippet demonstrates the concept of SQL Injection vulnerability within an affected application:

// Vulnerable code
$name = $_POST['name'];
$sql = "SELECT * FROM users WHERE name='$name'";
$result = mysqli_query($conn, $sql);

To exploit this vulnerability, an attacker would craft a malicious SQL query, such as

'; DROP TABLE users; --

Upon entering the malicious query into the input field, they could potentially delete the users table from the database.

The vulnerability was initially identified and reported publicly through the following sources

1. CVE-2023-35911 – National Vulnerability Database (NVD)
2. CVE-2023-2758 - Creative Solutions Contact Form Generator Vulnerability

To protect your application from SQL Injection attacks, follow these recommendations

1. Employ parameterized queries and prepared statements: This helps ensure that user-supplied data is treated as separate data, rather than executable SQL.

Example

$sql = "SELECT * FROM users WHERE name=?"; // Using a prepared statement
$stmt = mysqli_prepare($conn, $sql);
mysqli_stmt_bind_param($stmt, "s", $_POST['name']);
mysqli_stmt_execute($stmt);

Escape special characters: Apply escaping mechanisms to handle special characters in the input data.

4. Limit database permissions: Configure your application to use the least privileged database permissions necessary to carry out required tasks.
5. Keep software updated: Always update to the latest version of the software to benefit from security patches and fixes.

Conclusion

The SQL injection vulnerability, CVE-2023-35911, found in Creative Solutions Contact Form Generator (up to version 2.6.), can lead to severe consequences. It's crucial to understand and mitigate such vulnerabilities to protect your data and applications. Employing the recommended security practices mentioned above will minimize the risk of SQL Injection attacks.

Timeline

Published on: 11/06/2023 09:15:07 UTC
Last modified on: 11/10/2023 04:19:43 UTC