Secunia Research has discovered some vulnerabilities in Pulse CMS, which can be exploited by malicious users to compromise a vulnerable system and by malicious people to conduct cross-site request forgery attacks.

1) The application allows users to perform certain actions via HTTP requests without performing any validity checks to verify the requests. This can be exploited to e.g. delete image files or create blocks if a logged-in user visits a malicious web site.

The vulnerability is confirmed in versions 1.2.2 and 1.2.3. Prior versions may also be affected.

2) An error in the validation of uploaded image files can be exploited to upload files with an arbitrary extension to a folder within the web root. This can be exploited to upload and execute arbitrary PHP code.

Successful exploitation of this vulnerability requires authentication.

The vulnerability is confirmed in versions 1.2.2 and 1.2.3. Prior versions may also be affected. While version 1.2.4 implements fixes related to the image upload functionality, it can still be exploited to execute arbitrary PHP code by uploading a malicious PHP script with multiple extensions (e.g. "shell.php.gif") if Apache is not configured to handle the mime-type for media files with e.g. "gif" extensions.

Solution
Update to version 1.2.4, which fixes vulnerability #1 and partially fixes vulnerability #2.

Provided and/or discovered by
Secunia Research

Changelog
Further details available to Secunia VIM customers

Original Advisory
Secunia Research:
http://secunia.com/secunia_research/2010-46/
http://secunia.com/secunia_research/2010-47/

Pulse CMS:
http://pulsecms.com/blog.php

Deep Links
Links available to Secunia VIM customers