Whoogle Search is a self-hosted metasearch engine. Versions 0.8.3 and prior have a limited file write vulnerability when the configuration options in Whoogle are enabled. The config function in app/routes.py does not validate the user-controlled name variable on line 447 and config_data variable on line 437. The name variable is insecurely concatenated in os.path.join, leading to path manipulation. The POST data from the config_data variable is saved with pickle.dump which leads to a limited file write. However, the data that is saved is earlier transformed into a dictionary and the url key value pair is added before the file is saved on the system. All in all, the issue allows us to save and overwrite files on the system that the application has permissions to, with a dictionary containing arbitrary data and the url key value, which is a limited file write. Version 0.8.4 contains a patch for this issue.

References

• https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2024-22204
• benbusby/whoogle-search@3a2e0b2
• https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search/blob/92e8ede24e9277a5440d403f75877209f1269884/app/routes.py#L419-L452
• https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search/blob/92e8ede24e9277a5440d403f75877209f1269884/app/routes.py#L437
• https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search/blob/92e8ede24e9277a5440d403f75877209f1269884/app/routes.py#L444
• https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search/blob/92e8ede24e9277a5440d403f75877209f1269884/app/routes.py#L447
• https://github.com/pypa/advisory-database/tree/main/vulns/whoogle-search/PYSEC-2024-23.yaml
• https://securitylab.github.com/advisories/GHSL-2023-186_GHSL-2023-189_benbusby_whoogle-search