Konqueror in KDE 3.1.3 and earlier (kdelibs) allows remote attackers to bypass intended cookie access restrictions on a web application via "%2e%2e" (encoded dot dot) directory traversal sequences in a URL, which causes Konqueror to send the cookie outside the specified URL subsets, e.g. to a vulnerable application that runs on the same server as the target application.

A vulnerability was discovered in KDE where the path restrictions on cookies could be bypassed using encoded relative path components (e.g., '/../'). This means that a cookie which should only be sent by the browser to an application running at /app1, the browser could inadvertently include it with a request sent to /app2 on the same server.

Corsaire discovered that a number of HTTP user agents contained a flaw in how they handle cookies. This flaw could allow an attacker to avoid the path restrictions specified by a cookie's originator. According to their advisory :

'The cookie specifications detail a path argument that can be used to restrict the areas of a host that will be exposed to a cookie. By using standard traversal techniques this functionality can be subverted, potentially exposing the cookie to scrutiny and use in further attacks.'

This issue was fixed in KDE 3.1.3; the updated packages are patched to protect against this vulnerability.

Updated kdelibs packages that fix a flaw in cookie path handling are now available.

Konqueror is a file manager and Web browser for the K Desktop Environment (KDE).

Flaws have been found in the cookie path handling between a number of Web browsers and servers. The HTTP cookie standard allows a Web server supplying a cookie to a client to specify a subset of URLs on the origin server to which the cookie applies. Web servers such as Apache do not filter returned cookies and assume that the client will only send back cookies for requests that fall within the server-supplied subset of URLs. However, by supplying URLs that use path traversal (/../) and character encoding, it is possible to fool many browsers into sending a cookie to a path outside of the originally-specified subset.

KDE version 3.1.3 and later include a patch to Konquerer that disables the sending of cookies to the server if the URL contains such encoded traversals. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1 shipped with KDE 2.2.2 and is therefore vulnerable to this issue.

Users of Konquerer are advised to upgrade to these erratum packages, which contain a backported patch for this issue.

ID	Name	Product	Family	Severity
15296	Debian DSA-459-1 : kdelibs - cookie path traversal	Nessus	Debian Local Security Checks	high
14121	Mandrake Linux Security Advisory : kdelibs (MDKSA-2004:022)	Nessus	Mandriva Local Security Checks	high
12472	RHEL 2.1 : kdelibs (RHSA-2004:074)	Nessus	Red Hat Local Security Checks	high

Detections

Analytics

CVE-2003-0592

high

Tenable Plugins

high

high

high