Lotus Notes Stored Form Vulnerability

[Chris Jones <dp () ic-crypt com>]

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  Security Advisory:    Lotus Notes Stored Form Vulnerability
  Date:                         8th February 2001
  Author:               Chris Jones (aka dp) dp () ic-crypt com
  Versions Affected:    At present only Lotus Notes v4.6 has been tested
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----[ Exploit Introduction ] ------------------------------------------
Due to the design flaws of Lotus Notes databases, a user with sufficient knowledge can craft a Lotus Notes Email in 
such a way that the recipient only has to open the email or view the email using the preview panes to become infected 
or to run the arbitrary code.

The problem lies in Lotus Notes ability to allow developers to create forms that do not rely on a specific template in 
a database (like normal emails) but instead uses its own in built templates that travel within the document. Using 
these methods an experienced Lotus Notes developer could create an email enabled worm specifically for Lotus Notes 
networks. Which could do anything from delete a few files to granting ACL rights to the persons mail box (so all emails 
could be viewed) to retrieving the users cached passwords or similar information. Another key point that allows this 
exploit to occur is that the design of the mailbox database has by default been allowed to accept stored forms.


----[ Exploit Generation ] ---------------------------------------------
To generate the email a malicious user will need to modify the default 'memo' form's design - which does require a 
developer's edition of Lotus Notes. The malicious user then has to modify the forms' properties so the 'Store form in 
Document' action is checked. The malicious user then has a choice he could insert code into the forms 'PostOpen' event, 
which requires Lotus Script programming knowledge or he can go the easy method and modify the forms 'Launch' properties 
which allows you to launch the first document attachment when opened which could be absolutely anything.


----[ Quick Fix ] ------------------------------------------------------
There is a very quick and very easy method of disabling this feature and that is to modify the mailbox database 
properties so that the 'Allow stored forms' is unchecked. This will stop any forms of this attack.


----[ Platforms Tested ] -----------------------------------------------
We tested this exploit out using Lotus Notes version 4.6 but any version of Lotus Notes 4 should be affected, as I am 
sure lower and higher versions would be as well. In our experiment I was able to gain manager access to someone else's 
Email Box using 4 Lines of Lotus Script code.


----[ Other Notes ] ----------------------------------------------------
Using Lotus Script you can even change the source address of the email to fool the user into believing that the 
infected email came from a trusted source. You could even go so far as to code the email so it looks at the target's 
mailbox and creates a duplicate document of his most recent email, so it looks as some other user has sent him two 
copies of the same email.

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