Paul Gerste | The Blog Pros

August 14, 2021

New Analysis Reveals Etherpad 1.8.13 Code Execution Vulnerabilities

Etherpad is one of the most popular online text editors that allows collaborating on documents in real-time. It is customizable with more than 250 plugins available and features a version history as well as chat functionality. There are thousands of instances deployed worldwide with millions of users. The project is very popular within the open-source community as shown by the over 10,000 stars on GitHub. Etherpad instances are often publicly usable and can contain sensitive information.

As part of SonarSource's security research on open source projects we analyzed Etherpad's code and found 2 critical vulnerabilities. Both can be combined by an attacker to completely take over an Etherpad instance and its data. In this blog post, we cover the technical details of these code vulnerabilities, show how they were patched, and give advice on how to avoid these types of bugs during development.

June 26, 2021

NoSQL Injections in Rocket.Chat 3.12.1: How A Small Leak Grounds A Rocket

Rocket.Chat is one of the most popular open-source solutions for team communication, written in JavaScript and TypeScript. It has more than 12 million users worldwide and there are over 800,000 server instances deployed that are being used to exchange confidential information and files. My security research team and I discovered critical vulnerabilities in its source code that could have been used by an attacker to take complete control over a server, starting with as little as any user’s email address.

In this blog post, I investigate these vulnerabilities by first taking a quick look at NoSQL databases, then explain how injections look like in that context. I then analyze the found vulnerabilities and how they can be chained for an exploit. Finally, I give advice on how to prevent such bugs in your applications.

Build an Advanced RAG App: Query Rewriting
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In the last article, I established the basic architecture for a basic RAG app. In case you missed that, I recommend that you first read that article. That will set the base from which we can improve our RAG system. Also in that last article, I listed s... […]
Contexts in Go: A Comprehensive Guide
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Contexts in Go provide a standard way to pass metadata and control signals between goroutines. They are mainly used to manage task execution time, data passing, and operation cancellation. This article covers different types of contexts in Go and examp... […]
Next-Gen Lie Detector: Stack Selection
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The first lie detector which relied on eye movement appeared in 2014. The Converus team together with Dr. John C. Kircher, Dr. David C. Raskin, and Dr. Anne Cook launched EyeDetect — a brand-new solution to detect deception quickly and accurately. This... […]
Applying the Pareto Principle To Learn a New Programming Language
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In this article, I will discuss how you can apply the Pareto principle to quickly learn a new programming language and start solving real-world problems while you develop a deeper understanding of the programming language. What Is the Pareto Principle?... […]
Enhance IaC Security With Mend Scans
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Whether on the cloud or setting up your AIOps pipeline, automation has simplified the setup, configuration, and installation of your deployment. Infrastructure as Code(IaC) especially plays an important role in setting up the infrastructure. With IaC t... […]