nginx security advisory (CVE-2013-4547)

[Maxim Dounin]

Hello!

Ivan Fratric of the Google Security Team discovered a bug in nginx,
which might allow an attacker to bypass security restrictions in certain
configurations by using a specially crafted request, or might have
potential other impact (CVE-2013-4547).

Some checks on a request URI were not executed on a character following
an unescaped space character (which is invalid per HTTP protocol, but
allowed for compatibility reasons since nginx 0.8.41).  One of the
results is that it was possible to bypass security restrictions like

    location /protected/ {
        deny all;
    }

by requesting a file as "/foo /../protected/file" (in case of static
files, only if there is a "foo " directory with a trailing space), or to
trigger processing of a file with a trailing space in a configuration
like

    location ~ \.php$ {
        fastcgi_pass ...
    }

by requesting a file as "/file \0.php".

The problem affects nginx 0.8.41 - 1.5.6.

The problem is fixed in nginx 1.5.7, 1.4.4.

Patch for the problem can be found here:

http://nginx.org/download/patch.2013.space.txt

As a temporary workaround the following configuration
can be used in each server{} block:

    if ($request_uri ~ " ") {
        return 444;
    } 


-- 
Maxim Dounin
http://nginx.org/en/donation.html