Researchers at security firm CheckPoint have discovered multiple critical vulnerabilities in a popular IPTV middleware platform.

Security experts at CheckPoint have discovered multiple critical flaws in a popular IPTV middleware platform that is used by more than a thousand online media streaming services to manage their millions of subscribers.

Ministra TV platform is a PHP-based middleware platform for media streaming services, it manages Internet Protocol television (IPTV), video-on-demand (VOD) and over-the-top (OTT) content, licenses and their subscribers.

In order to receive the television broadcast, the set-top boxes (STB) connects to the Ministra and service providers use the platform to manage their customers.

The vulnerabilities affect the administrative panel of the Ministra TV platform (former Stalker Portal), it could be exploited by an attacker to bypass authentication access to information associated with subscribers.



Another scaring aspect of the discovery is that an attacker could exploit the flaws to broadcast and stream its content on the devices of the affected networks.

The platform is developed by the Ukrainian company Infomir, most of the providers that use are located in the United States (199), following with Netherlands (137), Russia (120), France (117) and Canada (105).

“About a year ago Check Point Research discovered critical vulnerabilities in a Ukrainian TV streaming platform that, if exploited, could leave service providers exposed to a serious breach.” states a blog post published by Check Point. “The risks would be their entire customer database of personal info and financial details as well as allowing an attacker to potentially stream any content they choose on to the screens of their customer network.“

CheckPoint researchers discovered a logical vulnerability in an authentication process implemented by the Ministra platform. A function used to authenticate users fails to validate the request, allowing a remote attacker to bypass authentication and perform SQL injection by exploiting a separate vulnerability.

“[ Ministra] It is PHP based, and like most web-based platforms, it has an admin interface that requires authentication.” continues the experts. “However, we were able to bypass the authentication mechanism and utilize some of the admin AJAX API functions. This lead to SQL Injection chained to PHP Object Injection vulnerabilities, effectively allowing us to remotely execute code on the server. “



The experts also demonstrated in a video PoC that it is possible to chain the flaws with a PHP Object Injection issue to remotely execute arbitrary code on the targeted server.

“In this particular case, we used the authentication bypass to perform an SQL Injection on the server,” continues the post. “With that knowledge, we escalated this issue to an Object Injection vulnerability, which in turn allowed us to execute arbitrary code on the server, potentially impacting not only the provider but also the provider’s clients.”

The security experts reported the flaws to the company, that addressed them with the release of Ministra version 5.4.1.

Pierluigi Paganini