Drupal fixes 2 critical code execution issues flaws in Drupal 7, 8.5 and 8.6

Drupal released security updates for Drupal 7, 8.5 and 8.6 that address two “critical” security vulnerabilities that could be exploited for arbitrary code execution.

The first vulnerability could be exploited by a remote attacker to execute arbitrary PHP code. The flaw resides in the phar stream wrapper implemented in PHP and is related to the way it handles untrusted phar:// URIs.

“A remote code execution vulnerability exists in PHP’s built-in phar stream wrapper when performing file operations on an untrusted phar:// URI. ” reads the security advisory.

“Some Drupal code (core, contrib, and custom) may be performing file operations on insufficiently validated user input, thereby being exposed to this vulnerability, This vulnerability is mitigated by the fact that such code paths typically require access to an administrative permission or an atypical configuration.”

The development team marked .phar as a potentially dangerous extension, this means that .phar files uploaded to a website running on the popular CMS will be automatically converted to .txt to prevent malicious execution.
Note that the replacement stream wrapper is not compatible with PHP versions lower than 5.3.3.

The development team has disabled the phar:// wrapper for Drupal 7 sites running a version of PHP earlier than 5.3.3.

“Drupal 7 sites using PHP 5.2 (or PHP 5.3.0-5.3.2) that require phar support will need to re-enable the stream wrapper for it; however, note that re-enabling the stream wrapper will re-enable the insecure PHP behavior on those PHP versions.” continues the advisory.

The second flaw affects the PEAR Archive_Tar, a third-party library that handles .tar files in PHP. An attacker could use a specially crafted .tar file to delete arbitrary files on the system and possibly even execute remote code.

“Drupal core uses the third-party PEAR Archive_Tar library. This library has released a security update which impacts some Drupal configurations. Refer to CVE-2018-1000888 for details.” reads the security advisory.

The development team behind the Archive_Tar have patched flaw and released the update it in the core of the CMS.

Drupal 8.6.6, 8.5.9 and 7.62 patch both flaws, experts highlighted that Drupal 8 versions prior to 8.5.x will no longer receive security updates because they have reached the end of life.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, RCE)

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