GHSA-mfxh-vp55-7gc6 CVE-2026-107843
Contao: The registration module re-sends activation mails
Medium
Packagist
- Severity
- 5.3 / 10
- Medium · CVSS 3.1
- Exploit chance (EPSS)
- 0.27%
- Chance of exploitation in the next 30 days. Higher than 19.25% of scored vulnerabilities.
- Known exploited
- No
- Not in CISA's catalog
- Weakness
- CWE-204 Observable Response Discrepancy
- CWE-770 Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling
- Fix
5.3.50- Upgrade contao/core-bundle to this version or later
Description
ModuleRegistration::compile() reaches its follow-up registration branch on any POST to a page carrying the module. That branch checks neither FORM_SUBMIT nor the captcha result computed immediately above it, and resendActivationMail() leads to OptInToken::send(), which has no rate limit at all.
Impact
Anyone on the internet can make a Contao installation send unlimited mail to an address of their choosing, from the site's own sender and reputation, at one outbound message per HTTP request. That is both a nuisance for the recipient and a deliverability risk for the site operator. The same request is a reliable account oracle for "this address has a pending registration on this site", which is exactly the sort of membership fact a public site is usually expected not to disclose.
Honest bound. The target must have an unconfirmed registration, that is tl_member.disable = 1 together with an unconfirmed reg- opt-in token. An attacker can create that state for an arbitrary address, since registration requires no ownership proof, but on a site where reg_activate is off the branch is unreachable.
Affected versions
Packagist
| Package | Vulnerable | Fixed in |
|---|---|---|
| contao/core-bundle | >= 4.1.0, < 5.3.50 |
5.3.50 |
| contao/core-bundle | >= 5.4.0-RC1, < 5.7.12 |
5.7.12 |
How to fix
Move to the fixed version or later with your package manager, update the lockfile, and run your tests. If the package only arrives through another dependency, upgrade that dependency first. If none of its releases pulls a fixed version yet, force the version with your package manager's override.
contao/core-bundle Packagist → 5.3.50
- composer
composer require contao/core-bundle:^5.3.50
Severity breakdown
CVSS 3.1 5.3
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:N/A:N
- Attack vector
- Network
- Attack complexity
- Low
- Privileges required
- None
- User interaction
- None
- Scope
- Unchanged
- Confidentiality
- Low
- Integrity
- None
- Availability
- None
Weakness
CWE-204: Observable Response Discrepancy
The product provides different responses to incoming requests in a way that reveals internal state information to an unauthorized actor outside of the intended control sphere.
How to prevent it
- Architecture and Design: Compartmentalize the system to have "safe" areas where trust boundaries can be unambiguously drawn. Do not allow sensitive data to go outside of the trust boundary and always be careful when interfacing with a compartment outside of the safe area. Ensure that appropriate compartmentalization is built into the system design, and the compartmentalization allows for and reinforces privilege separation functionality. Architects and designers should rely on the principle of least privilege to decide the appropriate time to use privileges and the time to drop privileges.
- Implementation: Ensure that error messages only contain minimal details that are useful to the intended audience and no one else. The messages need to strike the balance between being too cryptic (which can confuse users) or being too detailed (which may reveal more than intended). The messages should not reveal the methods that were used to determine the error. Attackers can use detailed information to refine or optimize their original attack, thereby increasing their chances of success. If errors must be captured in some detail, record them in log messages, but consider what could occur if the log messages can be viewed by attackers. Highly sensitive information such as passwords should never be saved to log files. Avoid inconsistent messaging that might accidentally tip off an attacker about internal state, such as whether a user account exists or not.
CWE-770: Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling
The product allocates a reusable resource or group of resources on behalf of an actor without imposing any intended restrictions on the size or number of resources that can be allocated.
How to prevent it
- Requirements: Clearly specify the minimum and maximum expectations for capabilities, and dictate which behaviors are acceptable when resource allocation reaches limits.
- Architecture and Design: Limit the amount of resources that are accessible to unprivileged users. Set per-user limits for resources. Allow the system administrator to define these limits. Be careful to avoid CWE-410.
- Architecture and Design: Design throttling mechanisms into the system architecture. The best protection is to limit the amount of resources that an unauthorized user can cause to be expended. A strong authentication and access control model will help prevent such attacks from occurring in the first place, and it will help the administrator to identify who is committing the abuse. The login application should be protected against DoS attacks as much as possible. Limiting the database access, perhaps by caching result sets, can help minimize the resources expended. To further limit the potential for a DoS attack, consider tracking the rate of requests received from users and blocking requests that exceed a defined rate threshold.
- Implementation: Assume all input is malicious. Use an "accept known good" input validation strategy, i.e., use a list of acceptable inputs that strictly conform to specifications. Reject any input that does not strictly conform to specifications, or transform it into something that does. When performing input validation, consider all potentially relevant properties, including length, type of input, the full range of acceptable values, missing or extra inputs, syntax, consistency across related fields, and conformance to business rules. As an example of business rule logic, "boat" may be syntactically valid because it only contains alphanumeric characters, but it is not valid if the input is only expected to contain colors such as "red" or "blue." Do not rely exclusively on looking for malicious or malformed inputs. This is likely to miss at least one undesirable input, especially if the code's environment changes. This can give attackers enough room to bypass the intended validation. However, denylists can be useful for detecting potential attacks or determining which inputs are so malformed that they should be rejected outright.
- Architecture and Design: For any security checks that are performed on the client side, ensure that these checks are duplicated on the server side, in order to avoid CWE-602. Attackers can bypass the client-side checks by modifying values after the checks have been performed, or by changing the client to remove the client-side checks entirely. Then, these modified values would be submitted to the server.
- Architecture and Design: Mitigation of resource exhaustion attacks requires that the target system either: recognizes the attack and denies that user further access for a given amount of time, typically by using increasing time delays uniformly throttles all requests in order to make it more difficult to consume resources more quickly than they can again be freed. The first of these solutions is an issue in itself though, since it may allow attackers to prevent the use of the system by a particular valid user. If the attacker impersonates the valid user, they may be able to prevent the user from accessing the server in question. The second solution can be difficult to effectively institute -- and even when properly done, it does not provide a full solution. It simply requires more resources on the part of the attacker.
- Architecture and Design: Ensure that protocols have specific limits of scale placed on them.
- Architecture and Design, Implementation: If the program must fail, ensure that it fails gracefully (fails closed). There may be a temptation to simply let the program fail poorly in cases such as low memory conditions, but an attacker may be able to assert control before the software has fully exited. Alternately, an uncontrolled failure could cause cascading problems with other downstream components; for example, the program could send a signal to a downstream process so the process immediately knows that a problem has occurred and has a better chance of recovery. Ensure that all failures in resource allocation place the system into a safe posture.
- Operation, Architecture and Design: Use quotas or other resource-limiting settings provided by the operating system or environment. For example, when managing system resources in POSIX, setrlimit() can be used to set limits for certain types of resources, and getrlimit() can determine how many resources are available. However, these functions are not available on all operating systems. When the current levels get close to the maximum that is defined for the application (see CWE-770), then limit the allocation of further resources to privileged users; alternately, begin releasing resources for less-privileged users. While this mitigation may protect the system from attack, it will not necessarily stop attackers from adversely impacting other users. Ensure that the application performs the appropriate error checks and error handling in case resources become unavailable (CWE-703).
References
Packages
Other links
Timeline
- Published
- Last updated by the source
- Latest EPSS score
Related advisories
| Advisory | Severity | Why it's related |
|---|---|---|
| GHSA-9ff2-p842-45wq Contao: Cross-site request forgery in custom backend actions | Low | Also affects contao/core-bundle |
| GHSA-q6wp-fr43-gm9v Contao: Improper access control in the preview links module | Medium | Also affects contao/core-bundle |
| GHSA-5974-gfqc-wrcm Contao: Improper access control in the table access voter | Medium | Also affects contao/core-bundle |
| GHSA-mrvp-7wmx-5m4h Contao: Path traversal in the images controller | Medium | Also affects contao/core-bundle |
| GHSA-x2rp-9qf7-2fmq Contao: Protected page content is disclosed to anonymous visitors after contao.search.index_protected is disabled | Medium | Also affects contao/core-bundle |
| GHSA-grm4-wm43-9jh5 Contao: Possible path traversal in job download URIs | Low | Also affects contao/core-bundle |
| GHSA-87mg-5grr-rhwh Contao: Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF) via Unvalidated RSS Feed URL in Feed Reader Module | Low | Also affects contao/core-bundle |
| GHSA-3mr9-p497-58f6 Contao crawler leaks auth credentials to external hosts | Low | Also affects contao/core-bundle |
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