A security hole in a popular development tool has severe implications for a number of the Internet’s most popular applications, including Gmail, Flikr and MSN Virtual Earth.
Tens of thousands of companies, including AOL, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, are likely to be affected by the flaw in CPAINT, a toolkit used to create applications using an approach known as AJAX, short for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. Rather than a technology in itself, AJAX is an approach to putting more dynamic interactivity into Web applications using a combination of HTML, CSS, Document Object Model, JavaScript and XMLHttpRequest.
The CPAINT flaw could allow an attacker to execute malicious code on a server running CPAINT, or running an application built using CPAINT, the software’s developers said in an advisory.
The bug affects all existing versions of CPAINT, both the ASP and PHP implementations, the CPAINT project said. The project issued a patch fixing the issue, CPAINT v1.3-SP, and is creating a more comprehensive fix for the forthcoming version, 2.0.0. “We highly recommend that everyone running any version of CPAINT immediately upgrade to this patched version for security purposes,” CPAINT’s developers wrote in the advisory.
The bug may affect more than just CPAINT. In an e-mail to the Bugtraq security mailing list, CPAINT developers warned that the same flaw is also likely to affect other AJAX toolkits, and urged other AJAX toolkit authors and users to test for security problems. “They are all very similar in the way they execute functions on the back end,” the developers wrote.
The AJAX approach has been adopted by a number of Web developers, the best known of them being Google, whose Google Maps, Google Suggest, Gmail and other applications all use AJAX. Other high-profile AJAX-based services include Microsoft’s MSN Virtual Earth, Yahoo’s Flickr and AOL’s AIM Mail. Many lesser-known services have also adopted AJAX, such as Swiss mapping service map.search.ch and invoicing program Blinksale.
The CPAINT security flaw doesn’t automatically mean such applications are vulnerable, but should be a warning to developers using toolkits to create dynamic Web applications, CPAINT developers said.
The term AJAX itself is contentious, having been coined by a consultancy firm, but has gained wide usage. Google itself calls its development approach simply JavaScript, while other Web developers have applauded the use of the new term.
The AJAX model adds more dynamic interactivity to Web applications, making them feel more like desktop applications. On the down side, because AJAX is made up of a number of different standards implemented in slightly different ways by browsers, it is very difficult to get AJAX applications working correctly with any browser, developers say.
Scripting has become a significant source of security vulnerabilities for Web applications. In January, Google patched a Gmail flaw that involved Perl script. PHP has been hit by several significant security flaws, including in April of this year and December 2004.
In July of this year a serious vulnerability surfaced in a Web service protocol used by a large number of Web applications. The holes were found in XML-RPC For PHP and PEAR XML_RPC, which are implementations of XML-RPC for the PHP scripting language.
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