Soapbox Engage Blog

I got forwarded an email yesterday about a vulnerability in the Joomla! component "a6MamboCredits". The vulnerability was due to three things.

1. Registered Globals were turned on.
2. Joomla! emulates registered globals turned on.
3. The global varible "mosConfig_absolute_path" was used to include files.

So the vulnerability was from code like the following:

 require_once( $GLOBALS['mosConfig_absolute_path'].
'/administrator/includes/pageNavigation.php' );

The solution and better programming would be to use either:

 $absolute_path$mainframe->getCfg('absolute_path');
require_once($absolute_path. '/administrator/includes/pageNavigation.php' );

or

 define( 'ABSOLUTE_PATH', dirname(__FILE__) );
require_once(ABSOLUTE_PATH. '/administrator/includes/pageNavigation.php' );

Little programming practices like this will make your components so much more secure. These vulnerabilities that keep popping up are from bad programming practices. They give Joomla! a bad name. So lets all start programming wisely.

A full security report can be found at Secunia (http://secunia.com/product/11570/).