Impact

This is a privilege escalation vulnerability. A DHIS2 user with authority to manage users can assign superuser privileges to themself by manually crafting an HTTP PUT request.

Only users with the following DHIS2 user role authorities can exploit this vulnerability:

• User (Add/Update/Delete)
• User Group (Add/Update/Delete)

Note that in many systems the only users with user admin privileges are also superusers. In these cases, the escalation vulnerability does not exist.

The vulnerability is only exploitable by attackers who can authenticate as users with the user admin authority. As this is usually a small and relatively trusted set of users, exploit vectors will often be limited.

Patches

DHIS2 administrators should upgrade to the following hotfix releases:

• 2.36.12.1
• 2.37.8.1
• 2.38.2.1
• 2.39.0.1

Workarounds

The only known workaround to this issue is to avoid the assignment of the user management authority to any users until the patch has been applied.

For more information

If you have any questions or comments about this advisory, email us at [email protected]