Dear list members,
a security issue has been identified (thanks to chbi from
https://chbi.eu/) in the media object component and fixed for ILIAS
version 5.1, 5.2 and 5.3beta.
We advise strongly to update your ILIAS installation to the latest
version. For more detailed explanations don't hesitate to contact us.
Best regards,
Michael Jansen
on behalf of the ILIAS e.V. and the Technical Board
Dear ILIAS-Admins,
in JourFixe-2017-09-25 [1] Alex Killing declared to step down from the
maintainership of the Setup and Matthias Kunkel called for applicants
for that vacancy.
I am indeed interested to take over the maintainership and the CaT
Concepts and Training GmbH is willing to make investments in the setup.
Since I have some opinions about the general direction the setup should
take and I'm not willing to just continue with the current model or
blindly accept payment for any feature in the setup, I want to check my
ideas with the community first before finally applying for maintainership.
I created a featurewiki page [2] containing my ideas. Please leave
comments and questions in the discussion section of this page as usual.
[1] https://www.ilias.de/docu/goto_docu_wiki_wpage_4835_1357.html
[2] https://www.ilias.de/docu/goto_docu_wiki_wpage_4900_1357.html
Best Regards!
--
Richard Klees
Lead Developer Qualifizierungsmanagement
---------------------------------------------
CaT Concepts and Training GmbH
Vorgebirgstraße 338
50969 Köln
Fon: +49 (0)221 / 46 75 76 - 56
Fax: +49 (0)221 / 46 75 76 - 09
Mail: richard.klees(a)concepts-and-training.de
Web: http://www.concepts-and-training.de
---------------------------------------------
Geschäftsführung:
Sven Kapust, Gerald Konrad, Alexandra Oehlke,
Sandra Röbbelen, Volker Röbbelen, Denis Witt
Amtsgericht Köln HRB 57804
Ust-ID-Nr.: DE 814694228
Sitz: Köln
---------------------------------------------
Dear list members,
a security issue has been identified (thanks to Timon Amstutz [Uni Bern
and ILIAS Technical Board]) and is fixed for ILIAS 5.2.x.
The issue was located in the 'Mail System' and affected the recipient
string parsing.
This led to a situation where an attacker in a group named 'admin'
received every email that was addressed to any assumed distinct local
role having 'admin' in its name (e.g.
"Course Administrator <#admin@[NameOfAnArbitraryCourse]>").
We advise strongly to update your ILIAS installation to the latest
version 5.2.7 .
Best regards,
Michael Jansen
on behalf of the ILIAS e.V. and the Technical Board
Hi Ralf,
Am 16.08.2017 um 15:59 schrieb Ralf Mattes:
> Am Mittwoch, 16. August 2017 15:13 CEST, Michael Jansen <mjansen(a)databay.de> schrieb:
>
>> Dear developers and administrators,
>>
>> the following information may save you some time as it took me a while to figure it out:
>>
>> Today I noticed some strange issues regarding XML handling in ILIAS with (v5.2.6 2017-07-13, PHP 5.6.31-4+ubuntu16.04.1+deb.sury.org+4). Initially, I discovered a problem in one of my plugins which deals with XML that uses simplexml_load_file() with a local(!) file.
>>
>> The error message I got from it was:
>>
>> simplexml_load_file(): I/O warning : failed to load external entity "[MY_FILE]"
>
> Hmm - you should have posted to this list earlier, that one is a really good ol' friend of mine ...
>
>> <...>
>>
>> When I added ...
>>
>> libxml_disable_entity_loader(false);
>>
>> ... in my plugin before using simplexml_load_file() and before the ILIAS SOAP server is instantiated
>> in ./webservice/soap/server.php, the issue seems to be fixed for both cases.
>>
>> libxml_disable_entity_loader() is not thread safe, so this is the root of all evil (including but not
>> limited to pineapple on pizza).
> To be technically correct, what's bitting you here isn't thread safety (I assume you are not running in
> a multi-threaded server environment) but global state. As (almost) always, global state is unfortunate.
"thread safe" was not the technically correct term. I noticed this after
I pushed the "Send" button in my email client ;-). I just meant: It
persists and could be caused by another process.
>
>> If ...
>>
>> libxml_disable_entity_loader(true);
>> ... is called in another script (or another PHP application) and not resetted to false, the problematic state persists globally. There are even some calls of with a boolean true in ILIAS (PHPExcel, SVG Sanitizer), which is dangerous in case an error occured and the state could not be properly resetted to a boolean false.
> Yes, that's exactly why global state is so dangerous even in single threaded environments. But, since external entity loading
> is known as a hard to control entry point for vulnerabilities it actually is a good idea to disable it.
Yes, global state is often evil. Especially, when it is mutated by other
libraries/dependencies or even other processes.
>
> BTW, do you now see why I'm so scared by other global state manipulations (umask, for example)?
>
> Cheers, Ralf Mattes
>
>
Best regards,
Michael