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Cookies are sent to external images in rendered diff (and server side request forgery)

Critical
michitux published GHSA-7rfg-6273-f5wp Nov 20, 2023

Package

maven org.xwiki.platform:xwiki-platform-diff-xml (Maven)

Affected versions

>= 11.10.1, < 14.10.15
>= 15.0-rc-1, < 15.5.1
>= 15.6-rc-1, < 15.6

Patched versions

14.10.15
15.5.1
15.6

Description

Impact

The rendered diff in XWiki embeds images to be able to compare the contents and not display a difference for an actually unchanged image. For this, XWiki requests all embedded images on the server side. These requests are also sent for images from other domains and include all cookies that were sent in the original request to ensure that images with restricted view right can be compared. This allows an attacker to steal login and session cookies that allow impersonating the current user who views the diff. The attack can be triggered with an image that references the rendered diff, thus making it easy to trigger.

More concretely, to reproduce, add 101 different images with references to the attacker's server. In any place add an image with a reference to /xwiki/bin/view/Image%20Cookie%20Test/?xpage=changes&rev1=1.1&rev2=2.1&include=renderedChanges where Image%20Cookie%20Test needs to be replaced by the path to the document with the images and the two revisions should match the revision before/after adding the images. Whenever a user views that image, the user's login cookies should be sent to the attacker's server. The 101 images are to circumvent the cache that has a default maximum size of 100 entries.

Apart from stealing login cookies, this also allows server-side request forgery (the result of any successful request is returned in the image's source) and viewing protected content as once a resource is cached, it is returned for all users. As only successful requests are cached, the cache will be filled by the first user who is allowed to access the resource.

Patches

This has been patched in XWiki 14.10.15, 15.5.1 and 15.6. The rendered diff now only downloads images from trusted domains. Further, cookies are only sent when the image's domain is the same the requested domain. The cache has been changed to be specific for each user.

Workarounds

As a workaround, the image embedding feature can be disabled by deleting xwiki-platform-diff-xml-<version>.jar in WEB-INF/lib/.

References

Severity

Critical

CVSS overall score

This score calculates overall vulnerability severity from 0 to 10 and is based on the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS).
/ 10

CVSS v3 base metrics

Attack vector
Network
Attack complexity
Low
Privileges required
Low
User interaction
Required
Scope
Changed
Confidentiality
High
Integrity
High
Availability
High

CVSS v3 base metrics

Attack vector: More severe the more the remote (logically and physically) an attacker can be in order to exploit the vulnerability.
Attack complexity: More severe for the least complex attacks.
Privileges required: More severe if no privileges are required.
User interaction: More severe when no user interaction is required.
Scope: More severe when a scope change occurs, e.g. one vulnerable component impacts resources in components beyond its security scope.
Confidentiality: More severe when loss of data confidentiality is highest, measuring the level of data access available to an unauthorized user.
Integrity: More severe when loss of data integrity is the highest, measuring the consequence of data modification possible by an unauthorized user.
Availability: More severe when the loss of impacted component availability is highest.
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:R/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H

CVE ID

CVE-2023-48240