Moodle filter_jmol - LFI

Sooraj V Nair

Published on

01 Oct 2021

Vulnerability

The Jmol/JSmol plugin is used to display chemical structures in Moodle using Java and JavaScript.The plugin uses a PHP server-side proxy to bypass client-side security constraints while loading third-party resources.This PHP proxy script calls the function file_get_contents() on unvalidated user input.

Impact

In the default PHP setup, this makes Moodle instances with this plugin vulnerable to directory traversal and server-side request forgery. If PHP’s “expect” wrapper is enabled, this may also result in remote code execution vulnerability.

Mitigation / Precaution

In order to patch this vulnerability, we recommend you to update the Jmol plugin to the latest version.

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