netVigilance Vulnerability intelligence since 2004

Archived document Original netVigilance advisory, published February 03 2004. Preserved as published — the advisory text and version numbers are unchanged; it is shown here converted from the original HTML page.

advisory0004 · CVE-2004-0129 · published 2004-02-03

Arbitrary File Disclosure Vulnerability in phpMyAdmin 2.5.5-pl1 and prior

archived risk: high

Current status

This advisory describes a vulnerability from 2004. It is not in the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog and there is no active remediation deadline. The page is kept online because other security databases link to it.

CVE reference CVE-2004-0129
In KEV catalog no
Affected software phpMyAdmin 2.5.5-pl1 and prior
Captured from netvigilance.com

Original document

Reproduced as it was published, including the advisory numbering, scoring and the disclosure timeline used at the time.

converted from html as published 2004-02-03
Description:
Directory traversal vulnerability in export.php in phpMyAdmin 2.5.5 and earlier allows remote attackers to read arbitrary files via .. (dot dot) sequences in the what parameter.

External References:
Mitre CVE: CVE-2004-0129
BUGTRAQ: 20040203Arbitrary File Disclosure Vulnerability in phpMyAdmin 2.5.5-pl1 and prior
BUGTRAQ ID (bid): 9564

Summary:
phpMyAdmin is a tool written in PHP intended to handle the administration of MySQL over the WWW. There is a vulnerability in the current stable version of phpMyAdmin that allows an attacker to retrieve arbitrary files from the webserver with privileges of the webserver.

Release Date:
February 03 2004

Severity:
High

SecureScout Testcase ID:
TC 17869 (released Feb 6th)

Vulnerable Systems:
phpMyAdmin 2.5.5-pl1 and prior

Vulnerability Type:
Directory Traversal - Allowing the Attacker to read any file on the Target Server via the .. (dot dot) Sequence.

Vendor Status:
The Vendor has been notified and has Released a Version 2.5.6-rc1 that fixes the problem

Example:
Arbitrary File Disclosure

File impacted : export.php

14:// What type of export are we doing?
15:if ($what == 'excel') {
16: $type = 'csv';
17:} else {
18: $type = $what;
19:}
20:
21:/**
22: * Defines the url to return to in case of error in a sql statement
23: */
24:require('./libraries/export/' . $type . '.php');

Exploit example:

- -- HTTP Request --

http://[target]/[phpMyAdmin_directory]/export.php?what=../../../../../../etc/passwd%00

- -- HTTP Request --

The vulnerability is available even if PHP register_globals is set to off.

Credits:
Cedric Cochin - netVigilance Vulnerability Research team
Original URL: /advisory0004.html · preserved at the same address

Why this page still exists

Advisories published between 2004 and 2015 are referenced by vulnerability databases, academic papers and mailing list archives. Removing them would break those references, so every advisory keeps its original address and its original text. Nothing on this page has been rewritten to match current practice.