CVE-2024-6649: Employee Gate Pass Logging System CSRF Flaw

CVE-2024-6649 Overview

CVE-2024-6649 is a Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) vulnerability in the SourceCodester Employee and Visitor Gate Pass Logging System version 1.0. The flaw resides in the save_users function inside Users.php. An attacker can craft a malicious request that, when triggered by an authenticated user, performs unauthorized user account operations. The attack is remotely exploitable and requires no authentication from the attacker, only the victim's active session. Public disclosure occurred through VulDB entry VDB-271057, making the exploit available to threat actors.

Critical Impact
Remote attackers can abuse an authenticated administrator's session to create or modify user accounts in the gate pass logging system without consent.

Affected Products

Oretnom23 (SourceCodester) Employee and Visitor Gate Pass Logging System 1.0
Component: Users.php — save_users function
CPE: cpe:2.3:a:oretnom23:employee_and_visitor_gate_pass_logging_system:1.0

Discovery Timeline

2024-07-10 - CVE-2024-6649 published to NVD
2026-06-17 - Last updated in NVD database

Technical Details for CVE-2024-6649

Vulnerability Analysis

The vulnerability is classified under CWE-352: Cross-Site Request Forgery. The save_users handler in Users.php processes user creation and modification requests without validating that the request originated from a legitimate application workflow. The application does not implement anti-CSRF tokens, does not verify the Origin or Referer headers, and does not require re-authentication for sensitive account operations. An attacker who lures an authenticated administrator to a malicious page can force the browser to submit a state-changing request to the vulnerable endpoint. The impact is limited to integrity of user account data, with no direct confidentiality or availability loss according to the published metrics.

Root Cause

The root cause is the absence of request-origin validation on a state-changing endpoint. The save_users function trusts any authenticated session cookie presented by the browser, regardless of which page initiated the POST. Without a per-session or per-request CSRF token bound to the form, the server cannot distinguish legitimate submissions from forged ones.

Attack Vector

Exploitation requires an authenticated user, typically an administrator, to visit an attacker-controlled page while logged into the target application. The malicious page auto-submits an HTML form or issues a scripted fetch request to Users.php targeting the save_users action. The browser attaches the victim's session cookie, and the server processes the forged request. Because the attack is delivered over the network and requires no attacker privileges, it can be launched from phishing emails, malicious ads, or compromised third-party sites.

See the public writeup for the request structure and payload example: GitHub CSRF Vulnerability Report.

Detection Methods for CVE-2024-6649

Indicators of Compromise

Unexpected user accounts appearing in the gate pass system administration panel.
POST requests to Users.php with Referer headers pointing to external or unrelated domains.
Account modification events occurring outside normal administrator working hours.
Duplicate or anomalous session activity from the same administrator IP within short time windows.

Detection Strategies

Inspect web server access logs for POST requests to Users.php where the Referer header is missing, empty, or does not match the application's own hostname.
Correlate administrator authentication events with subsequent save_users invocations to identify requests not preceded by legitimate UI navigation.
Deploy a Web Application Firewall (WAF) rule that flags state-changing POSTs lacking a valid CSRF token parameter.

Monitoring Recommendations

Enable audit logging on all user account creation and modification actions with full request metadata.
Alert on any addition of privileged accounts or role changes within the application.
Monitor outbound proxy logs for administrator browsers visiting untrusted domains while active application sessions exist.

How to Mitigate CVE-2024-6649

Immediate Actions Required

Restrict access to the application to trusted internal networks or a VPN until a fix is applied.
Instruct administrators to log out of the application when not actively using it.
Review the user account table for unauthorized entries and disable any suspicious accounts.
Enforce browser isolation or a separate browser profile for administrative access to the application.

Patch Information

No vendor patch is listed for CVE-2024-6649 in the referenced advisories. The vendor oretnom23 distributes the Employee and Visitor Gate Pass Logging System through SourceCodester as a small PHP application, and no fixed version has been published. Users should track the VulDB entry #271057 for future updates.

Workarounds

Implement a reverse proxy or WAF rule that requires a SameSite=Strict session cookie and validates the Origin header on all POST requests to Users.php.
Manually patch Users.php to generate a per-session CSRF token, embed it in every form, and validate it on the server side before executing save_users.
Add Referer header validation as a defense-in-depth measure, rejecting requests that do not originate from the application's own domain.
Migrate to an actively maintained alternative if the application is used in a production environment.

bash

# Example nginx snippet enforcing same-origin POSTs to Users.php
location ~ /Users\.php$ {
    if ($request_method = POST) {
        set $csrf_ok 0;
        if ($http_origin = "https://gatepass.internal.example") { set $csrf_ok 1; }
        if ($csrf_ok = 0) { return 403; }
    }
    include fastcgi_params;
    fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php/php-fpm.sock;
}