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Privilege Chaining with the user admin role in dhis2-core

Moderate
Philip-Larsen-Donnelly published GHSA-59fm-8432-2426 Dec 8, 2022

Package

dhis2-core (none)

Affected versions

2.34, 2.35, 2.36, 2.37, 2.38, 2.39

Patched versions

2.36.12.1, 2.37.8.1, 2.38.2.1, 2.39.0.1

Description

Impact

This is a privilege escalation vulnerability. A DHIS2 user with authority to manage users can assign superuser privileges to themself by manually crafting an HTTP PUT request.

Only users with the following DHIS2 user role authorities can exploit this vulnerability:

  • User (Add/Update/Delete)
  • User Group (Add/Update/Delete)

Note that in many systems the only users with user admin privileges are also superusers. In these cases, the escalation vulnerability does not exist.

The vulnerability is only exploitable by attackers who can authenticate as users with the user admin authority. As this is usually a small and relatively trusted set of users, exploit vectors will often be limited.

Patches

DHIS2 administrators should upgrade to the following hotfix releases:

  • 2.36.12.1
  • 2.37.8.1
  • 2.38.2.1
  • 2.39.0.1

Workarounds

The only known workaround to this issue is to avoid the assignment of the user management authority to any users until the patch has been applied.

For more information

If you have any questions or comments about this advisory, email us at security@dhis2.org

Severity

Moderate
6.7
/ 10

CVSS base metrics

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

CVE ID

CVE-2022-41948

Weaknesses

Credits