Apache OptionsBleed Information Leak

There have been reports of a new remote information disclosure vulnerability in Apache HTTP Server, when the HTTP "OPTIONS" method is enabled and a misconfiguration occurs. While the misconfiguration trigger seems rare in production environments, the Apache .htaccess file ability enables users of virtual hosting services to intentionally introduce the bug in a shared environment and thus be able to abuse the vulnerability condition.

​The bug has been assigned CVE-2017-9798 and reportedly affects the latest Apache release. There is a proof of concept example available to trigger the fault, however after hours of testing at OSI Security we were unable to reproduce the information leak.

Reportedly, it only occurs in high traffic Apache websites and the examples used were from the Alexa Top 400 Global Websites, where the author noticed HTTP responses that included abnormal returned bytes of system memory outside of expected use, or HTTP server content destined for other website visitors / cached in memory.

Example request:

OPTIONS /index.html HTTP/1.0

Example vulnerable response:

HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Allow: GET,HEAD,OPTIONS,,HEAD,,HEAD,,HEAD,, HEAD,,HEAD,,HEAD,,HEAD,POST,,HEAD,, HEAD,!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"

It is clear from the disclosed example, that the Allow header should only include GET, HEAD and OPTIONS (or others such as PUT and DELETE) however the server leaks information from other memory locations.

The vulnerability is reportedly triggered where the Apache server is used, with the OPTIONS request enabled, with a <Directory> definition (or a .htaccess file) which contains a e.g. <Limit GET> access control which contains an invalid method name. An example would be <Limit GETT>, as a system administrator introduced typo.

At this stage the vulnerability appears to be impractical and of low risk, however we suggest checking your Apache server configuration for Limit directives which may contain errors.

At the same time as this report, during a client penetration test we discovered a minimal risk/impact vulnerability in the latest release of Apache which we reported to the security team. The bug has since been patched in source code and should be included in the next stable release.