CVE intelligence and bounded remediation
CVE-2021-36766 — Concrete5 through 8.5.5 deserializes Untrusted Data
Concrete5 through 8.5.5 deserializes Untrusted Data. The vulnerable code is located within the controllers/single_page/dashboard/system/environment/logging.php Logging::update_logging() method. User input passed through the logFile request parameter is not properly sanitized before being used in a call to the file_exists() PHP function. This can be exploited by malicious users to inject arbitrary PHP objects into the application scope (PHP Object Injection via phar:// stream wrapper), allowing them to carry out a variety of attacks, such as executing arbitrary PHP code.
- Severity
- High
- CVSS
- 7.2 (3.1)
- Published
- 2021-07-30
- CISA KEV
- Not currently listed
- Ecosystem
- software/application
- Weaknesses
- CWE-502
Affected products
- concretecms / concrete_cms
Matched remediation archetype
Unsafe deserialization and object reconstruction
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Check exposure
- Inventory serialization formats accepted from requests, queues, caches, files, cookies, and cross-service messages.
- Trace whether untrusted input can select classes, types, callbacks, constructors, or object hooks during decoding.
- Identify signing, schema validation, trust-boundary, and compatibility settings for each decoder.
Remediate safely
- Replace native object deserialization with a data-only format and explicit schema validation.
- If replacement is not immediate, use a safe decoder with a minimal type allowlist and disable polymorphic or executable hooks.
- Update the affected library and add inert tests for unknown types, extra fields, malformed nesting, and unsigned data.
Authoritative sources
Complete CVE record and remediation plan
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