Improper Handling of Apple HFS+ Alternate Data Stream Path
The product does not properly handle special paths that may identify the data or resource fork of a file on the HFS+ file system.
Description
If the product chooses actions to take based on the file name, then if an attacker provides the data or resource fork, the product may take unexpected actions. Further, if the product intends to restrict access to a file, then an attacker might still be able to bypass intended access restrictions by requesting the data or resource fork for that file.
Background
The Apple HFS+ file system permits files to have multiple data input streams, accessible through special paths. The Mac OS X operating system provides a way to access the different data input streams through special paths and as an extended attribute:
Resource fork: file/..namedfork/rsrc, file/rsrc (deprecated), xattr:com.apple.ResourceFork
Data fork: file/..namedfork/data (only versions prior to Mac OS X v10.5)
Additionally, on filesystems that lack native support for multiple streams, the resource fork and file metadata may be stored in a file with "._" prepended to the name.
Forks can also be accessed through non-portable APIs.
Forks inherit the file system access controls of the file they belong to.
Programs need to control access to these paths, if the processing of a file system object is dependent on the structure of its path.
Demonstrations
The following examples help to illustrate the nature of this weakness and describe methods or techniques which can be used to mitigate the risk.
Note that the examples here are by no means exhaustive and any given weakness may have many subtle varieties, each of which may require different detection methods or runtime controls.
Example One
A web server that interprets FILE.cgi as processing instructions could disclose the source code for FILE.cgi by requesting FILE.cgi/..namedfork/data. This might occur because the web server invokes the default handler which may return the contents of the file.
See Also
Weaknesses in this category are related to file handling.
This category identifies Software Fault Patterns (SFPs) within the Path Traversal cluster (SFP16).
This view (slice) covers all the elements in CWE.
This view (slice) lists weaknesses that can be introduced during implementation.
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