Impact
There are a number of CKAN plugins, including XLoader, DataPusher, Resource proxy and ckanext-archiver, that work by downloading the contents of local or remote files in order to perform some actions with their contents (e.g. pushing to the DataStore, streaming contents or saving a local copy). All of them use the resource URL, and there are currently no checks to limit what URLs can be requested. This means that a malicious (or unaware) user can create a resource with a URL pointing to a place where they should not have access in order for one of the previous tools to retrieve it (known as a Server Side Request Forgery).
Patches and Workarounds
Users wanting to protect against these kinds of attacks can use one or a combination of the following approaches:
- Use a separate HTTP proxy like Squid that can be used to allow / disallow IPs, domains etc as needed, and make CKAN extensions aware of this setting via the
ckan.download_proxy
config option.
- Implement custom firewall rules to prevent access to restricted resources.
- Use custom validators on the resource
url
field to block/allow certain domains or IPs.
All latest versions of the plugins linked above support the ckan.download_proxy
settings. Support for this setting in the Resource Proxy plugin was included in CKAN 2.10.5 and 2.11.0
References
- Blog post provides more details on how to configure a Squid proxy to prevent these issues
References
Impact
There are a number of CKAN plugins, including XLoader, DataPusher, Resource proxy and ckanext-archiver, that work by downloading the contents of local or remote files in order to perform some actions with their contents (e.g. pushing to the DataStore, streaming contents or saving a local copy). All of them use the resource URL, and there are currently no checks to limit what URLs can be requested. This means that a malicious (or unaware) user can create a resource with a URL pointing to a place where they should not have access in order for one of the previous tools to retrieve it (known as a Server Side Request Forgery).
Patches and Workarounds
Users wanting to protect against these kinds of attacks can use one or a combination of the following approaches:
ckan.download_proxy
config option.url
field to block/allow certain domains or IPs.All latest versions of the plugins linked above support the
ckan.download_proxy
settings. Support for this setting in the Resource Proxy plugin was included in CKAN 2.10.5 and 2.11.0References
References