CVE-2020-22165
📋 TL;DR
CVE-2020-22165 is a SQL injection vulnerability in PHPGurukul Hospital Management System v4.0 that allows remote unauthenticated attackers to execute arbitrary SQL queries. This can lead to unauthorized access to sensitive database information including patient records, user credentials, and system data. Any organization running the vulnerable version of this hospital management software is affected.
💻 Affected Systems
- PHPGurukul Hospital Management System
📦 What is this software?
⚠️ Risk & Real-World Impact
Worst Case
Complete database compromise leading to theft of all patient medical records, financial data, and administrative credentials, potentially resulting in data breach, ransomware deployment, or system takeover.
Likely Case
Extraction of sensitive patient information and user credentials, enabling further system access and potential data exfiltration.
If Mitigated
Limited or no data exposure if proper input validation and parameterized queries are implemented.
🎯 Exploit Status
Public exploit code is available on GitHub, making exploitation trivial for attackers with basic SQL injection knowledge.
🛠️ Fix & Mitigation
✅ Official Fix
Patch Version: Unknown
Vendor Advisory: No official vendor advisory found
Restart Required: No
Instructions:
1. Check for official patches from PHPGurukul. 2. If no patch exists, implement manual fixes by modifying user-login.php to use parameterized queries. 3. Validate and sanitize all user inputs in the login functionality.
🔧 Temporary Workarounds
Input Validation and Sanitization
allAdd input validation and sanitization to the login form parameters before processing SQL queries.
Modify \hms\user-login.php to validate and sanitize user inputs using PHP's filter_var() or mysqli_real_escape_string() functions
Web Application Firewall (WAF)
allDeploy a WAF with SQL injection protection rules to block exploitation attempts.
Configure WAF rules to detect and block SQL injection patterns in login requests
🧯 If You Can't Patch
- Isolate the system from internet access and restrict to internal network only
- Implement strict network segmentation and monitor all database access attempts
🔍 How to Verify
Check if Vulnerable:
Test the login endpoint with SQL injection payloads (e.g., ' OR '1'='1) and observe if database errors or unexpected responses occur.Check Version:
Check the system version in the admin panel or review the software documentation/configuration filesVerify Fix Applied:
Attempt the same SQL injection tests and verify they are properly rejected without database errors or information disclosure.📡 Detection & Monitoring
Log Indicators:
- Unusual SQL error messages in application logs
- Multiple failed login attempts with SQL-like patterns
- Database queries with unusual syntax from the login endpoint
Network Indicators:
- HTTP requests to user-login.php containing SQL keywords (UNION, SELECT, etc.)
- Unusual database connection patterns from the web server
SIEM Query:
source="web_logs" AND uri="/hms/user-login.php" AND (request_body CONTAINS "UNION" OR request_body CONTAINS "SELECT" OR request_body CONTAINS "' OR '")