WESTPOINT has discovered a vulnerability in Konqueror, which potentially can be exploited by malicious people to conduct session fixation attacks.

The problem is that websites are allowed to set cookies for certain country-specific secondary top-level domains. This can be exploited to fix a session by setting a known session ID in a cookie, which the browser sends to all web sites operating under an affected domain.

Successful exploitation may allow a session to be hijacked.

In Konqueror, successful exploitation requires that the domain does not end in ".com", ".net", ".mil", ".org", ".gov", ".edu", nor ".int" and the secondary part has more than two characters (e.g. ".plc.uk").

The vulnerability affects KDE versions up to 3.2.3.

Another inappropriate behaviour has also been reported, where HTTP-based websites are allowed to set cookies for HTTPS-based sites under the same domain. This can potentially be exploited to hijack a session, if malicious people are able to manipulate the HTTP traffic.

Solution
Apply patches.
Further details available to Secunia VIM customers

Provided and/or discovered by
WESTPOINT

Changelog
Further details available to Secunia VIM customers

Original Advisory
http://www.kde.org/info/security/advisory-20040823-1.txt
http://www.westpoint.ltd.uk/advisories/wp-04-0001.txt

Other references
Further details available to Secunia VIM customers

Deep Links
Links available to Secunia VIM customers