CSRF Vulnerability

[ankane]

PgHero is vulnerable to cross-site request forgery (CSRF). This vulnerability has been assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2020-16253.

Versions Affected: 2.6.0 and below
Fixed Versions: 2.7.0

Impact

The PgHero dashboard is vulnerable to cross-site request forgery (CSRF). This affects the Docker image, Linux packages, and in specific cases, the Ruby gem. The Ruby gem is vulnerable with non-session based authentication methods like basic authentication - session-based authentication methods (like Devise's default authentication) are not affected.

A CSRF attack works by getting an authorized user to visit a malicious website and then performing requests on behalf of the user. In this instance, actions include:

1. Canceling running queries
2. Running EXPLAIN on queries (without seeing the results, but can be used for denial of service and other attacks)
3. Resetting query stats (running pg_stat_statements_reset())

All users running an affected release should upgrade immediately.

Credits

Thanks to Heiko Webers of https://bauland42.com for reporting this.

Technical Details

PgHero uses the protect_from_forgery method from Rails to prevent CSRF. However, this defaults to :null_session, which has no effect on non-session based authentication methods. This has been changed to protect_from_forgery with: :exception.