NGSSoftware Insight Security Research Advisory

Name: Lotus Domino View ACL by-pass
Systems Affected: Lotus Domino Web Server 5.x on all operating systems
Severity: Possibly high
Vendor URL: http://www.lotus.com/
Author: David Litchfield (davidnextgenss.com)
Date: 29th October 2001
Advisory number: #NISR29102001C

Description
***********
Lotus Domino is an Application server designed to aid workgroups and
collaboration on projects and offers SMTP, POP3, IMAP, LDAP and web
services that allow users to interact with Lotus Notes databases.

A Lotus Notes database contains documents which are organized into
views. Access control lists can be applied to the database itself, views
and documents. If a user has been denied access to a view, NISR have
discovered that it is possible to by-pass the permissions set on that
view and access the documents one would expect it to protect.

Details
*******
The reason this vulnerability exists is because even though a document
might exist in one view it can be accessed from any view, that is all
documents in a Lotus Notes database can be access from any view.

As an example of this examine the Statistics Reporting database,
statrep.nsf.

If you open the Events view:

http://server/statrep.nsf/136/?OpenView

some documents will exist. (136 is the NoteID of the Events view)

If you open the hidden $Alarms view

http://server/statrep.nsf/$alarms/?OpenView

no documents exist.

Request one of the documents from the Events view

http://server/statrep.nsf/136/8F6?OpenDocument

(8F6 is the NoteID of the first document)

Note the text of this document and then request

http://server/statrep.nsf/$alarms/8F6?OpenDocument

The same document is returned, even though $alarms has no documents.

Now,if you apply access controls on the Events view and request

http://server/statrep.nsf/136/8F6?OpenDocument

the server will return an Illegal Argument exeception error. This is due
to the fact that the server expects credentials.

However, requesting

http://server/statrep.nsf/$alarms/8F6?OpenDocument

still returns the document even though access to the view the document
exists in disallowed.

The reason we can request any document through any view is due to the
fact that a NoteID is simply a pointer to a location in the database
file and as long as the server receives its expected syntax, i.e.
database, view then document it will service the request. By making a
request with a NoteID we're simply forcing the server to return the
contents of an arbitrary location within the file.

Fix Information
***************
The solution to this problem is to ensure that,if you are applying ACLs
to a view, the documents in that view are also protected.

Lotus were informed about this issue and their response was that
applying ACLs to a view protected only the view and not the documents
themselves and that they, too, should have access control lists applied.

NISR consider that the difference between expected and actual behaviour
is considerable enough that many Lotus administrators may be caught out
by this and should ensure that their sensitive documents are indeed
protected.

A check for this issue already exists in DominoScan, NGSSoftware's Lotus
Domino application security scanner, of which, more information is
available from http://www.nextgenss.com/dominoscan.html . NISR have also
written a white paper on how to secure Lotus Domino's web server
available from http://www.nextgenss.com/papers.html

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