Some vulnerabilities have been in Mongoose, which can be exploited by malicious people to bypass certain security restrictions, disclose sensitive information, and cause a DoS (Denial of Service).

1) An error within the handling of HTTP requests can be exploited to disclose the source code of certain scripts (e.g. PHP) by appending "::$DATA" or "/" to a URI.

2) An error when handling HTTP requests containing 8.3 aliases (short file names) can be exploited to access normally restricted directories or disclose a script's source code.

3) An error exists when determining if a requested file should be handled as a script. This can be exploited to trigger the interpretation of e.g. ".phpx" files as ".php" scripts by requesting their 8.3 alias.

4) An error when handling certain HTTP requests can be exploited to access file outside of the web root via directory traversal attacks.

5) A signedness error in the "discard_current_request_from_buffer()" function can be exploited to cause the process to crash via a specially crafted web request with a negative value in the "Content-Length" header.

This vulnerability is confirmed in version 2.11.

The other vulnerabilities are confirmed in version 2.8. Other versions may also be affected.

Solution
Filter malicious requests with a proxy.

Provided and/or discovered by
1) Dr_IDE
2, 3) Dan Crowley, Core Security Technologies
4) Gerardo Richarte, Core Security Technologies
5) John Leitch

Changelog
Further details available in Customer Area

Original Advisory
Dr_IDE:
http://pocoftheday.blogspot.com/2009/10/mongoose-web-server-v280-remote-source.html
http://pocoftheday.blogspot.com/2009/10/mongoose-web-server-v280-remote-source_22.html

Core Security Technologies:
http://www.coresecurity.com/content/filename-pseudonyms-vulnerabilities

Mongoose:
http://code.google.com/p/mongoose/issues/detail?id=90

John Leitch:
http://www.johnleitch.net/Vulnerabilities/Mongoose.2.11.Denial.Of.Service/74

Deep Links
Links available in Customer Area