Executive Summary

CVE-2020-37145 is a Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) vulnerability in HRSALE version 1.1.8 that allows attackers to add unauthorized administrative users through the employee registration form.

An attacker can craft a malicious HTML page with hidden form fields designed to trick authenticated administrators into unknowingly submitting requests that create new user accounts with elevated privileges.

This attack requires the administrator to be authenticated and to interact with the malicious page, which then performs the unauthorized action without their explicit consent.

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Impact Analysis

This vulnerability allows attackers to escalate privileges by adding unauthorized administrative users to the HRSALE system.

As a result, attackers can gain administrative control over the system, potentially compromising sensitive HR data and system integrity.

Because the attack exploits the trust of authenticated administrators, it can lead to unauthorized access and manipulation of employee records and other critical information.

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Compliance Impact

I don't know

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Detection Guidance

[{'type': 'paragraph', 'content': 'This vulnerability can be detected by monitoring for unauthorized creation of administrative users through the employee registration form, especially via POST requests to the endpoint /admin/employees/add_employee.'}, {'type': 'paragraph', 'content': 'You can look for suspicious POST requests containing parameters that create new users with elevated privileges, such as role=admin.'}, {'type': 'paragraph', 'content': 'A practical approach is to inspect web server logs for POST requests to /admin/employees/add_employee with unusual or unexpected user creation parameters.'}, {'type': 'paragraph', 'content': 'Example commands to detect such activity might include:'}, {'type': 'list_item', 'content': "Using grep on web server logs to find POST requests to the vulnerable endpoint: grep 'POST /admin/employees/add_employee' /var/log/apache2/access.log"}, {'type': 'list_item', 'content': "Searching for creation of admin users by filtering for role=admin in POST data (if logs contain POST data): grep 'role=admin' /var/log/apache2/access.log"}, {'type': 'list_item', 'content': 'Monitoring for new user accounts with administrative privileges created recently in the application database or user management system.'}] [1, 3]

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Mitigation Strategies

Immediate mitigation steps include implementing proper CSRF protections on the employee registration form to prevent unauthorized requests.

Ensure that the application requires a valid, unpredictable CSRF token for all state-changing requests, especially those that create or modify user accounts.

Restrict the ability to add administrative users to trusted and authenticated sessions only, and consider adding additional verification steps such as multi-factor authentication.

Review and monitor user creation logs to detect and remove any unauthorized administrative accounts created via this vulnerability.

If possible, update or patch the HRSALE application to a version that addresses this vulnerability.

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