Description

Improper neutralization of special elements used in an SQL command ('SQL injection') vulnerability in Karel Electronic Industry and Trade Inc. KarelIPS allows Blind SQL Injection. This issue affects KarelIPS: through 22092026. NOTE: The vendor was contacted and it was learned that the product is not supported.

Executive Summary

Technical Details

Mitigations

References

Additional Metadata

{
  "score": "9.8",
  "pubDate": "2026-09-22T14:17:12.490Z",
  "pubdate": "2026-09-22T14:17:12.490Z",
  "executiveSummary": "The Karel Electronic Industry and Trade Inc. KarelIPS product, in versions up to 22092026, is susceptible to a Blind SQL Injection vulnerability. This flaw stems from the improper neutralization of special elements used within SQL commands, allowing an unauthenticated or authenticated attacker to infer data from the backend database by observing the application's responses to specifically crafted queries.\nThe vulnerability poses a severe risk to the confidentiality and integrity of the database managed by KarelIPS. By manipulating input parameters that are inadequately sanitized before being passed to the database engine, an attacker can extract sensitive information, such as user credentials, configuration data, or system metadata, through boolean-based or time-based inferential techniques. Given that the vendor has confirmed the product is no longer supported, there will be no official security patches or updates provided to remediate this flaw. Organizations currently utilizing KarelIPS remain permanently exposed to exploitation, necessitating the implementation of compensating controls at the network or application delivery level to mitigate the risk of data exfiltration and unauthorized database access.",
  "technicalDetails": "The root cause of this vulnerability is the failure of the KarelIPS application to properly sanitize, escape, or parameterize user-supplied input before incorporating it into SQL queries. This allows an attacker to inject malicious SQL syntax into application parameters. Because the application is specifically vulnerable to Blind SQL Injection, the backend does not return raw database errors or query results directly to the user interface. Instead, the attacker must rely on inferential techniques to exfiltrate data.\nThe attack flow begins with the attacker identifying input vectors—such as URL parameters, HTTP headers, or form fields—that interact with the backend database. The attacker sends a series of crafted HTTP requests containing boolean-based queries (e.g., 'AND 1=1' vs 'AND 1=0') or time-based payloads (e.g., 'WAITFOR DELAY' or 'pg_sleep()'). By observing variations in the HTTP response content, HTTP status codes, or the latency of the server's response, the attacker can verify whether the injected SQL logic was successfully executed by the database engine.\nOnce the vulnerability is confirmed, the attacker can systematically query the database schema to enumerate table names, column names, and eventually the data contained within those tables. This is achieved through an automated iterative process where each bit or character of the target data is deduced based on the true/false response of the application. For instance, an attacker might use an expression like 'AND (SELECT ASCII(SUBSTRING(username,1,1)) FROM users WHERE id=1) > 100' to extract the first character of a username, character by character.\nThis vulnerability is critical because it bypasses traditional input validation filters that might only look for obvious syntax like UNION statements. The attack requires no special privileges to initiate if the vulnerable endpoint is exposed on the network. The post-exploitation impact is extensive; it enables full unauthorized access to the backend database contents, which may lead to complete compromise of the application's user database, credential theft, or the extraction of sensitive business logic stored within the database. Because KarelIPS is unsupported, there is no prospect of a vendor-supplied code fix to enforce parameterized queries or Prepared Statements, which are the primary defense against SQL injection. Consequently, the application remains inherently insecure against any actor capable of reaching the vulnerable input parameters via the network."
}