Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Fix processing of response body when gzip compression is enabled #107

Closed

Conversation

turchanov
Copy link
Contributor

Changed placement of ngx_http_modsecurity_module in nginx load order of modules
to come after ngx_http_gzip_filter_module so that we could read a response body
before it gets compressed.

Prior to this fix ngx_http_modsecurity_body_filter was called after gzip filter
so that msc_append_response_body was fed with compressed body bytes thus
effectively making all further response body processing meaningless.

…_t buffers.

The documentation [http://nginx.org/en/docs/dev/development_guide.html#buffer]
clearly states that .pos, .last must be used to reference actual data
contained by the buffer. Whereas .start, .end denote the boundaries of the memory
block allocated for the buffer (in case of dynamically allocated data) or just
NULL (when .pos, .last reference a static memory location - one can see that
kind of usage in ngx_http_gzip_filter_module.c:ngx_http_gzip_filter_gzheader()).
To back up my words I invite to examine
ngx_http_charset_filter_module.c:ngx_http_charset_recode() as an example of
iteration over data contained in data buffer.

Without this fix ngx_http_modsecurity_body_filter feeds random bytes from
memory pointed by .start, .end range to msc_append_response_body. In my case
is was 8KB of data instead of 10 bytes when referenced by (.pos, .last).
That is this vulnerability may disclose sensitive data like passwords or
whatever from nginx heap.

The fix for ngx_http_modsecurity_pre_access_handler is to use .pos not .start to
reference data as they may differ in general case.
… can be

called by Nginx several times during request processing. And each time with
it own unique set of chained buf pointers.

For example, suppose a complete response consists of this chain of data:
    A->B->C->D->E
Ngix may (and actually does, as verified by me in gdb) call body filter two
times like this:
    handler(r, in = A->B->C)
    handler(r, in = D->E), E has last_buf set

Current implementation delays feeding chain->buf to msc_append_response_body
until it comes upon a chain with buf->last_buf set. So we loose chain containing
A->B->C sequence. We must process body bufs as soon as we see them in body
handler otherwise we will not see them again.

N.B. You have PR owasp-modsecurity#84 pending. It goes further and fixes the problem when
a blocking decision is made after headers were sent. I intentionally retained
current (buggy) behavior to make my patch less intrusive and easier to review.
Besides owasp-modsecurity#84 impose an excessive memory usage due to a complete copy of all
bufs passed through body filter (we have sometimes 500K and more replies in our
applications) - I will elaborate on this in code review for owasp-modsecurity#84.
…of modules

to come after ngx_http_gzip_filter_module so that we could read a response body
before it gets compressed.

Prior to this fix ngx_http_modsecurity_body_filter was called after gzip filter
so that msc_append_response_body was fed with compressed body bytes thus
effectively making all further response body processing meaningless.
@zimmerle zimmerle requested review from defanator and zimmerle May 15, 2018 15:24
@zimmerle zimmerle self-assigned this May 15, 2018
zimmerle pushed a commit that referenced this pull request May 15, 2018
@zimmerle
Copy link
Contributor

Merged! Thanks!

@zimmerle zimmerle closed this May 15, 2018
pracj3am pushed a commit to cdn77/ModSecurity-nginx that referenced this pull request Nov 4, 2022
Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Labels
None yet
Projects
None yet
Development

Successfully merging this pull request may close these issues.

2 participants