In-depth analysis of the Atom CMS 2.0 vulnerability： revealing the truth behind remote code execution

Introduction

Atom CMS is an open-source content management system dedicated to helping web developers create interactive and dynamic web applications in a simple and efficient manner. It provides a user-friendly development environment that allows developers to easily implement modern features. However, despite Atom CMS creating a good developer experience, Atom CMS 2.0 has a serious security flaw—a non-authenticated file upload vulnerability. This vulnerability allows users to upload files without any authentication, and the application does not perform effective checks on the file extension and type of the uploaded content. This design flaw allows attackers to upload malicious PHP shells, thereby gaining remote control permissions over the server. This article will deeply analyze the causes, exploitation methods, and potential security impacts of this vulnerability.

Experimental environmentSettings

The following are the steps for configuring the experimental environment:

Set up the Apache server. This experiment uses the XAMPP server for configuration.

Download the source code and unzip it into the web directory, ensuring that all necessary files have the required permissions.

Make necessary modifications in the 'connection.php' file, such as database username, password, database name, etc. Create a database named 'atomcms' and import the database file provided in the source code.

Visit the login page of the administrator panel