Pierluigi Paganini
January 23, 2015
Even the giants have their Achilles heel, the Google Apps administrator console is affected by a critical cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability that could be exploited by attackers to force a Google Apps admins to execute request on the https://admin.google.com/ domain.
The unknown flaw was first discovered by application security engineer Brett Buerhaus that reported it to Google on September 1st. Google promptly resolved the problem and fixed the flaw within 17 days. Buerhaus received by Google $5,000 as a reward under its bug bounty program.
The Google Apps admin console is the instrument used by administrators to manage their corporate account, it allows to add new users, enable Google services the domain, configure permissions and manage security settings.
The XSS flaw allowed attackers to force the admin to do the following actions:
Buerhaus explained that if users are not authorized to use a specific service they will be presented with a “ServiceNotAllowed” page, the expert explained that this page could be exploited to switch between accounts in order to log in to the service.
“The ServiceNotAllowed page appears when you are attempting to access a Google app service that has not been configured for your domain. It requires that you are logged into at least two accounts and will give you a form to switch accounts to continue to the service you were trying to load.” said Buerhaus in a blog post.
When the user selects one of the accounts, a piece of JavaScript code was executed to redirect its Web browser, but the JavaScript code could be supplied by the user in the “continue” request parameter of the URL, which results vulnerable to XSS attacks.
“When you select an account via the bullet on the page, it executes JavaScript to redirect your browser. The URL used in this JavaScript is supplied by the user in the continue request parameter.The continue request parameter is fairly common request variable in the Google login flow. This is the only page that I could find that did not validate the URL passed into it. This allowed you to craft Cross-Site Scripting attacks by using “javascript:” as part of the URL and it would execute when the browser location is redirected.” continues the post.
(Security Affairs – Google XSS, Google Apps)
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