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Indico Tampering with links (e.g. password reset) in sent emails

High severity GitHub Reviewed Published Apr 8, 2021 in indico/indico • Updated Sep 5, 2023

Package

pip indico (pip)

Affected versions

< 2.3.4

Patched versions

2.3.4

Description

Impact

An external audit of the Indico codebase has discovered a vulnerability in Indico's URL generation logic which could have allowed an attacker to make Indico send a password reset link with a valid token pointing to an attacker-controlled domain by sending that domain in the Host header. Had a user clicked such a link without realizing it does not point to Indico (and that they never requested it), it would have revealed their password reset token to the attacker, allowing them to reset the password for that user and thus take over their Indico account.

  • If the web server already enforces a canonical host name, this cannot be exploited (this was not part of the default config from the Indico setup guide)
  • If only SSO is used (LOCAL_IDENTITIES set to False), the vulnerability cannot be exploited for password reset links, but other links in emails set by Indico could be tampered with in the same way (with less problematic impact though)

Patches

You need to update to Indico 2.3.4 as soon as possible.
See the docs for instructions on how to update.

Workarounds

You can configure the web server to canonicalize the URL to the hostname used for Indico. See this commit for the changes in our setup docs; they can be easily applied to your existing web server config.

For more information

If you have any questions or comments about this advisory:

References

Published by the National Vulnerability Database Apr 7, 2021
@ThiefMaster ThiefMaster published to indico/indico Apr 8, 2021
Reviewed Apr 8, 2021
Published to the GitHub Advisory Database Apr 8, 2021
Last updated Sep 5, 2023

Severity

High
7.5
/ 10

CVSS base metrics

Attack vector
Network
Attack complexity
Low
Privileges required
None
User interaction
None
Scope
Unchanged
Confidentiality
None
Integrity
High
Availability
None
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:N

Weaknesses

CVE ID

CVE-2021-30185

GHSA ID

GHSA-wgpj-7c2j-vfjm

Source code

No known source code
Checking history
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