Ten Points Random

Tag: stupid

GIMP Lives!

by on Sep.19, 2009, under Technology

One of the things that I’ve hated about my favorite photo editing program since they release version 2.6 was that the tool boxes jumped on top of everything (like always-on-top for just the application).  Despite my best efforts, I never found the option to change that until today.

Because the option is named very, very poorly. :-(

As is pointed out here, the name of the option you are looking for that will change the window behavoir back to how it used to be in previouse versions is hidden under Edit -> Preferences -> Window Management -> “Window Manager Hints”.  Yeah that’s right.  Poorly named to anyone but the developer that made it.  Under that change the Hint for toolbox/other docks options to “Normal Window” instead of “Utility Window”.

Restart and there you go!

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Zen Cart Fail

by on Aug.21, 2009, under Technology

On the list of stupid things to do and big security holes, one of the best (or worst) I’ve seen to date is one that was built into our beloved E-commerce solution: Zen Cart.

You don’t have to login to get into the admin.

I’ve tried it personally on versions 1.2.6 and 1.3.7, and to my knowledge, it works almost every other version.

I haven’t tested it myself, but I’ve looked through the files, and it looks like the most current version you can download from their website (1.3.8a) is also just as vulnerable. (edit: I tried it, fortunately it’s not vulnerable.)

Most security holes require a little bit of knowledge of web technologies to exploit, but this one’s so bad, just about anyone can do it.  Here’s how stupid it is:

  1. Find your Zen Cart, say it’s http:/example.com/store
  2. Find your admin.  Usually it’s /admin/
  3. Choose an admin page.  How about sqlpatch.php?
  4. Add /password_forgotten.php (versions 1.3) or /login.php (versions 1.2) to the end of that.
  5. Visit it: http://example.com/store/admin/sqlpatch.php/password_forgotten.php
  6. Bingo!  Full access without ever logging in.

This is bad.  If you have Zen Cart on your site, PATCH IT NOW, before someone kinder than me goes looking for you and uses this to take control of your hosting account.

How it works:

Most web servers stop processing the directory once they hit a (PHP) file.  This allows you to do things like example.com/index.php/some/random/pseudo/rewrite.  That’s fine.

But Zen Cart did it wrong.  When they go to check to see if you should be logged in they do this:  (code rewritten for simplicity)

if(basename($PHP_SELF) != 'index.php' && 
   basename($PHP_SELF) != 'password_forgotten.php') {
  //Send them to the login page and exit
}

Did you catch that?

They use basename() on PHP_SELF!  PHP_SELF is basically the request URI without the “search” variable on it. So, if I go to “http://example.com/store/admin/sqlpatch.php/password_forgotten.php”, PHP_SELF is “store/admin/sqlpatch.php/password_forgotten.php”

If I send that to basename (which is a string parsing function only), “sqlpatch.php” is considered part of the directory name and we get “password_forgotten.php” for the filename.  Zen Cart checks that and lo! It’s allowed!

What should have been used was $_SERVER[‘SCRIPT_FILENAME’] which will always give you the name of the currently executing “parent” script, not what the user typed in.

Why this is bad:

Zen Cart’s admin is great!  You can run SQL patches (SQL injection), upload files with various names (arbitrary code execution), and edit the template .php files for certain pages (XSS, arbitrary code execution,  etc.) all from the comfort of the admin!

Once someone gets in, it’s easy for a malicious user to to upload a shell script that does his/her mindless bidding, be that viral site attacking, spam bots, porn mirror, etc.

The End of Zen Cart

Of course the Zen Cart developers found out about it.  What was their advisement?  That you should have changed the path to your admin folder, but since some of you don’t think that’s security we also made a patch. (The wording is mostly mine, the font sizes, not so much.)

That’s you attitude towards something so critical as this?

I bid thee farewell Zen Cart.

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I’m a Nerd

by on Mar.09, 2009, under General

Trading Cards

So I went over to my friend’s house today, and while I was there, he and another friend spent a considerable amount of time discussing the various details of their plans to acquire every Pokémon in the latest Pokémon game.  They talked about how he had a Whoosher and he hard a hard time getting the Kiglebat and how he needed the Bellittlebox to make the Showlinxtre evolve.  (Yeah I’m making that part up, but only because I can’t remember the details; this is the only point of mitigation that I can claim on this post.)

After that was over we whipped out ye many-years-old Yu-Gi-Oh card game decks, and not only did we have a crazy couple battles, one in which I cleaned up against the other players and one in which I barely pinched by on the wire, but we actually managed to show some semblance of remembering the rules!

What a handful of 20+ year old males have business doing either of those, I don’t know, even if it’s fun.

:-)

Don’t tell anyone we hoped to date, okay?

Image Copyright 2008 rbatina, some rights reserved

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Running over dogs

by on Jan.25, 2009, under General

No, I didn’t hit any.

I’m note sure what it it.  As I was driving to church today there was a guy walking his son and 3-4 small, white, fuzzy dogs.  (I’m assuming they were Bichon Frisés.)  Anyhow, none of them were on leashes, so they wandered wherever they wanted – including onto the road.  I stopped for one, who thought its walk would be better spent on the other side of the road.  I stared to go again.  Just as I was starting to get up to speed, another dog that had walked on ahead decided it wanted to cross the road too.  Right in front of me!

Since I was keeping a wary eye on it already, I was able to stop just fine, but what is it that possesses people to think it’s okay to take a whole bunch of dogs out, without training or leash, and just let them run around as you “walk” them?  Anyone who was driving with less care/who was driving distracted would have turned that fuzzy creature into a splat on the road.  Admittedly, it’s the driver’s responsibility to watch the road, but even the best driver can’t go from 65 to 0 when something darts out ten feet in front of him.

Anyhow, be sure to keep your dogs on a leash, or don’t scome crying to me when I run it over.

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