DOS attack with forced persistent connections

PMASA-2016-45

Announcement-ID: PMASA-2016-45

Date: 2016-07-21

Summary

DOS attack with forced persistent connections

Description

A vulnerability was discovered where an unauthenticated user is able to execute a denial-of-service (DOS) attack by forcing persistent connections when phpMyAdmin is running with $cfg['AllowArbitraryServer']=true;.

Severity

We consider this vulnerability to be critical, although note that phpMyAdmin is not vulnerable by default.

Mitigation factor

This attack requires phpMyAdmin to be configured with$cfg['AllowArbitraryServer']=true;

Affected Versions

All 4.6.x versions (prior to 4.6.4), 4.4.x versions (prior to 4.4.15.8), and 4.0.x versions (prior to 4.0.10.17) are affected.

Solution

Upgrade to phpMyAdmin 4.6.4, 4.4.15.8, or 4.0.10.17 or newer or apply patch listed below.

References

Thanks to Emanuel Bronshtein @e3amn2l for reporting this vulnerability.

Assigned CVE ids: CVE-2016-6622

CWE ids: CWE-661

Patches

The following commits have been made on the 4.0 branch to fix this issue:

• 8e0918c

The following commits have been made on the 4.4 branch to fix this issue:

• 10bdb0d

The following commits have been made on the 4.6 branch to fix this issue:

• 767195e

More information

For further information and in case of questions, please contact the phpMyAdmin team. Our website is phpmyadmin.net.