A security flaw was found in the way the sandboxed Python mechanism implemenation of Plone, a user friendly and powerful content management system, performed sanitization of certain commands. A remote attacker could provide a specially-crafted URL that, when processed could allow extensively expensive operations to be performed or, potentially, in conjunction with other attack vectors to extract or modify privileged information. References: [1] http://plone.org/products/plone/security/advisories/20121106/11 [2] http://plone.org/products/plone/security/advisories/20121106/ Relevant upstream HotFixes: [3] http://plone.org/products/plone-hotfix/releases/20121106 From the OSS post: [4] http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2012/11/07/4 the python_scripts.py go_back() change from upstream HotFix is relevant to this issue.
The CVE identifier of CVE-2012-5495 has been assigned to this issue: http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2012/11/10/1
This issue may affect the version of plone as shipped with EPEL5, however the latest version there is 3.1.6 (and the latest 3.x release is 3.3.5, which was released a year prior to this flaw being discovered). Given the age of the EPEL5 package and its lack of support, we do not recommend anyone use it. This issue does not affect plone as provided with the conga package on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. Statement: Not vulnerable. This issue did not affect the versions of luci (as provided by conga) as shipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.