Description of problem:

The foreman & Katello projects received an upstream notification about the discovery of an authenticated sql injection vulnerability within katello:

Dear Katello/Foreman Team,

During an internal test it was discovered that the scoped search
parameters sort_by and sort_order are vulnerable to an authenticated SQL
injection.

If we access:
https://x.x.x.x/katello/api/v2/organizations/1/sync_plans/1/products?available_for=sync_plan&full_result=true&page=1&search=&sort_by=name&sort_order=ASC'

we will see the following error:

{"displayMessage":"PG::Error: ERROR:  unterminated quoted string at or
near \"', katello_products.id <http://katello_products.id> DESC\"\nLINE
1: ...n_id IS NULL))  ORDER BY katello_products.name
<http://katello_products.name> ASC', katello...\n
                                      ^\n: SELECT \"katello_products\".*
FROM \"katello_products\"  WHERE \"katello_products\".\"id\" IN (SELECT
DISTINCT \"katello_products\".\"id\" FROM \"katello_products\"  WHERE
\"katello_products\".\"organization_id\" = 1 AND (katello_products.id
<http://katello_products.id> in (NULL) or katello_products.id
<http://katello_products.id> in (6,5,4,2,3,1)) AND (sync_plan_id != '1'
OR sync_plan_id IS NULL))  ORDER BY katello_products.name
<http://katello_products.name> ASC', katello_products.id
<http://katello_products.id> DESC","errors":["PG::Error: ERROR:
unterminated quoted string at or near \"', katello_products.id
<http://katello_products.id> DESC\"\nLINE 1: ...n_id IS NULL))  ORDER BY
katello_products.name <http://katello_products.name> ASC', katello...\n


The injection can be exploited as a blind time based injection.

Best Regards
Oliver

External reference:
The line of code in question here is:  https://github.com/Katello/katello/blob/KATELLO-3.0/app/controllers/katello/api/v2/api_controller.rb#L67