Full Path Disclosure

This is an Attack. To view all attacks, please see the Attack Category page.

Last revision: 02/1/2011

Description

Full Path Disclosure (FPD) vulnerabilities enable the attacker to see the path to the webroot/file. e.g.: /home/omg/htdocs/file/. Certain vulnerabilities, such as using the load_file() (within a SQL Injection) query to view the page source, require the attacker to have the full path to the file they wish to view.

Risk Factors

TBD

Examples

Empty Array

If we have a site that uses a method of requesting a page like this:

http://site.com/index.php?page=about

We can use a method of opening and closing braces that causes the page to output an error. This method would look like this:

http://site.com/index.php?page[]=about

This renders the page defunct thus spitting out an error:

Warning: opendir(Array): failed to open dir: No such file or directory in /home/omg/htdocs/index.php on line 84
Warning: pg_num_rows(): supplied argument ... in /usr/home/example/html/pie/index.php on line 131

Null Session Cookie

Another popular and very reliable method of producing errors containing a FPD is to give the page a nulled session using Javascript Injections. A simple injection using this method would look something like so:

javascript:void(document.cookie="PHPSESSID=");

By simply setting the PHPSESSID cookie to nothing (null) we get an error.

Warning: session_start() [function.session-start]: The session id contains illegal characters, 
valid characters are a-z, A-Z, 0-9 and '-,' in /home/example/public_html/includes/functions.php on line 2

This vulnerability is prevented simply by turning error reporting off so your code does not spit out errors.

error_reporting(0);

Direct Access to files that requires preloaded library files

Web application developers sometimes fail to add safe checks in files that requires preloaded library/function files. This is prone to reveal possible sensitive information when those applications' URLs are directly requested. Sometimes, it's a clue to Local File Inclusion vulnerability.

Concerning with Mambo CMS, if we access to a direct url, http://site.com/mambo/mambots/editors/mostlyce/jscripts/tiny_mce/plugins/spellchecker/classes/PSpellShell.php, then we gets

<br />
<b>Fatal error</b>:  Class 'SpellChecker' not found in <b>/home/victim/public_html/mambo/mambots/editors/mostlyce/jscripts/tiny_mce/plugins/spellchecker/classes/PSpellShell.php</b> on line <b>9</b><br />

Tool

The above three checks can be done with the aid of inspathx tool.

Related Threat Agents

• internal software developer

Related Attacks

• SQL Injection
• Relative Path Traversal

Related Vulnerabilities

• None

Related Controls

• Error Handling
• Bounds Checking
• Safe Libraries
• Static Code Analysis
• Executable space protection
• Address space layout randomization (ASLR)
• Stack-smashing Protection (SSP)

References

• http://www.acunetix.com/vulnerabilities/Full-path-disclosure.htm
• Articled summarised from Full Path Disclosure article by haZed on EnigmaGroup.org.
• Path Disclosure Vulnerability - Is it serious?
• inspathx - Internal Path Disclosure Finder