DEF CON Safe Mode - Oleksandr Mirosh, Alvaro Munoz - Scribbling Outside the Lines of Template Sec
Channel: DEFCONConference
Date: 05/08/2020

Now more than ever, digital communication and collaboration are essential to the modern human experience. Shared digital content is everywhere and Content Management Systems (CMS) play a crucial role allowing users to design, create, modify and visualize dynamic content. In our research we discovered multiple ways to achieve Remote Code Execution (RCE) on CMS platforms through which an attacker can take full control of the resources your organization relies on.

Using a Microsoft SharePoint server as our main CMS attack surface, we combined flaws in its implementation and design with framework and language specific features to find six unique RCE vulnerabilities. In addition, we discovered ways to escape template sandboxes of the most popular Java Template engines and achieved RCE in many products including: Atlassian Confluence, Alfresco, Liferay, Crafter CMS, XWiki, Apache OfBiz, and more. We will analyze how these products and frameworks implement security controls and review the various techniques that we used to bypass them. We will describe all the vulnerabilities we uncovered in detail and show working demos of the most interesting attacks. Finally, we will present our general review methodologies for systems with dynamic content templates and provide practical recommendations to better protect them.