Open Redirect Vulnerability in Umbraco 4

Friday, February 03, 2012 by Niels Hartvig

Yesterday we got informed that there' was an "Open Redirect Vulnerability" issue in Umbraco 4. We fixed it this morning. While we don't agree with the security consultants that it's a major issue, we do our best to fix reported security issues as fast as possible and have full disclosure.

Is this issue relevant for you?

The issue means that someone could make your editors click a link (in an e-mail or on a 3rd party website) pointing to the back office of your site, but then change where the editor would be redirected afterwards if they login. This will require that you run Umbraco with the back office fully open and that it's an active editor that logins into the site. For instance:
http://yoursite.com/umbraco/?redir=http://myevilsite.com

Once your editor have authenticated, they'd be redirected to the evil site. No data is shared with that evil site, but it could add a fake Umbraco login page and try to fake your editor to submit their credentials again. That way they could then jump to your website and login. All this would require a number of ifs and ifs, but the risk is real and may be important enough for you to upgrade…

How to upgrade

In a hurry, you can go download the 4.7.1.478 nightly which contains the fix. If you're running 4.7.1.1, all you need to do is to overwrite the "/bin/umbraco.dll" file. If running older versions, please refer to the upgrade guide.

4.7.1.2 next week

We'll be releasing an official 4.7.1.2 early next week.

Umbraco 5

This issue is present in Umbraco 5 as well and will be fixed for 5.0.1.

Questions?

Feel free to submit questions in the comments.

7 comment(s) for “Open Redirect Vulnerability in Umbraco 4”

  1. Gravatar ImagePaul Says:

    Any news on when 4.7.1.2 will be made available?

  2. Gravatar ImageNiels Hartvig Says:

    4.7.1.2 will come out Wednesday (the 8th).

  3. Gravatar ImagePaul Says:

    *cough*

  4. Gravatar ImageHartvig Says:

    Things never go as planned do they.

  5. Gravatar ImageSjors Pals Says:

    I already noticed this issue a long time ago, but also thought this is so minor, not even worth mentioning.

  6. Gravatar ImageJoey Kincer Says:

    I actually think the v4.7.x TinyMCE issues in Webkit browsers are more important to address than this (at least my clients do!) but I'm waiting patiently like the rest of everyone else for new updates.

    I'm digging the progress codebase for v5. Maybe you guys should make one for v4.x as well so we don't have to keep wondering and bugging y'all. :)

  7. Gravatar ImageJohn Says:

    Any news on the release 4.7.1.2?

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