Quantum Secular Labs / Blog / Advisories

CVE-2023-48365: Qlik Sense HTTP Tunneling Vulnerability

CVE-2023-48365 is rated critical with a CVSS v3.1 base score of 9.9 and affects Qlik Sense. Per its scoring, it can be exploited over the network, without any user interaction. The scored impact on confidentiality, integrity and availability is the highest available. CISA added it to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on 2025-01-13, which means exploitation in the wild has been observed.

Vulnerability description

Qlik Sense Enterprise for Windows before August 2023 Patch 2 allows unauthenticated remote code execution, aka QB-21683. Due to improper validation of HTTP headers, a remote attacker is able to elevate their privilege by tunneling HTTP requests, allowing them to execute HTTP requests on the backend server that hosts the repository application. The fixed versions are August 2023 Patch 2, May 2023 Patch 6, February 2023 Patch 10, November 2022 Patch 12, August 2022 Patch 14, May 2022 Patch 16, February 2022 Patch 15, and November 2021 Patch 17. NOTE: this issue exists because of an incomplete fix for CVE-2023-41265.

Severity breakdown

CVSS v3.1 9.9: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H

  • Attack vector: Network. Exploitable remotely over the network, with no need for local or physical access.
  • Attack complexity: Low. No special conditions; the attack can be repeated reliably.
  • Privileges required: Low. A basic user account is enough.
  • User interaction: None. No action from any user is needed.
  • Scope: Changed. Impact reaches beyond the vulnerable component to other resources.
  • Confidentiality impact: High. Total loss of confidentiality; sensitive data can be fully disclosed.
  • Integrity impact: High. Total loss of integrity; data or system state can be fully modified.
  • Availability impact: High. Total loss of availability; the component can be shut down.

Underlying weakness

CWE-444: Inconsistent Interpretation of HTTP Requests

The product acts as an intermediary HTTP agent (such as a proxy or firewall) in the data flow between two entities such as a client and server, but it does not interpret malformed HTTP requests or responses in ways that are consistent with how the messages will be processed by those entities that are at the ultimate destination.

Affected products

  • Qlik Sense: august_2022; august_2022 patch_1; august_2022 patch_10; august_2022 patch_11; august_2022 patch_12; august_2022 patch_13; august_2022 patch_2; august_2022 patch_3; august_2022 patch_4; august_2022 patch_5; august_2022 patch_6; august_2022 patch_7

References