The Host Authorization middleware in Action Pack is vulnerable to crafted X-Forwarded-Host values

How it was found

Title: The Host Authorization middleware in Action Pack is vulnerable to crafted X-Forwarded-Host values Scope: https://github.com/rails/rails Weakness: Open Redirect Severity: Medium Link: https://hackerone.com/reports/1189310 Date: 2021-05-09 06:29:19 +0000 By: @mshtawy CVE IDs: CVE-2021-22942, CVE-2021-22881

Details:

Steps to reproduce

This is a follow up to CVE-2021-22881 and https://github.com/rails/rails/commit/83a6ac3fee8fd538ce7e0088913ff54f0f9bcb6f

with a controller like the following

class TestsController < ApplicationController
  extend ActiveSupport::Concern

  def index
    redirect_to('/')
  end
end

when sending a request like the following where the URL has a mixed case characters

curl 'http://localhost:3000/tests' -H 'X-Forwarded-Host: Evil.com'

Or all capital case

curl 'http://localhost:3000/tests' -H 'X-Forwarded-Host: EVIL.COM'

Expected behavior

<div id="container">
  <h2>To allow requests to evil.com, add the following to your environment configuration:</h2>
  <pre>config.hosts &lt;&lt; "Evil.com"</pre>
</div>

Actual behavior

<html><body>You are being <a href="http://Evil.com/">redirected</a>.</body></html>% 

System configuration

Rails version: Tested on Rails 6.1.3.1 and Rails 6.1.3.2 Ruby version: N/A

Notes

This was fixed in main in this PR https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/41435 but still affects <= 6.1.3.1

The problem is in this code https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/6-1-stable/actionpack/lib/action_dispatch/middleware/host_authorization.rb#L115

origin_host = valid_host.match(
  request.get_header("HTTP_HOST").to_s.downcase)
forwarded_host = valid_host.match(
  request.x_forwarded_host.to_s.split(/,\s?/).last)

forwarded_host is missing a downcase after the .to_s, which results in nil assigned to forwarded_host, which then results in true in the following code

origin_host && @permissions.allows?(origin_host[:host]) && (forwarded_host.nil? || @permissions.allows?(forwarded_host[:host]))

because of the nil? check on the forwarded_host

forwarded_host.nil? || @permissions.allows?(forwarded_host[:host])

The examples I gave are using localhost, but I also confirmed this using a production environment with a configuration like the following

    Rails.application.config.hosts = %w(.EXAMPLE.com)

Impact

Hackers can redirect victims to a malicious website.

Timeline: 2021-08-03 20:27:55 +0000: @tenderlove (bug triaged)

2021-09-07 20:30:35 +0000: @tenderlove (cve id added)

2021-10-05 20:37:19 +0000: @tenderlove (bug resolved)

Impact

Hackers can redirect victims to a malicious website.