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Cross-site request forgery (CSRF) via the REST API

Critical
michitux published GHSA-6xxr-648m-gch6 Jul 10, 2023

Package

maven com.xpn.xwiki.platform:xwiki-core-rest-server (Maven)

Affected versions

>= 1.8, < 14.10.8

Patched versions

14.10.8
maven com.xpn.xwiki.platform:xwiki-rest (Maven)
>= 1.8, < 14.10.8
14.10.8
maven org.xwiki.platform:xwiki-platform-rest-server (Maven)
>= 1.8, < 14.10.8
>= 15.0-rc-1, < 15.2
14.10.8
15.2

Description

Impact

The REST API allows executing all actions via POST requests and accepts text/plain, multipart/form-data or application/www-form-urlencoded as content types which can be sent via regular HTML forms, thus allowing cross-site request forgery. With the interaction of a user with programming rights, this allows remote code execution through script macros and thus impacts the integrity, availability and confidentiality of the whole XWiki installation.

For regular cookie-based authentication, the vulnerability is mitigated by SameSite cookie restrictions but as of March 2023, these are not enabled by default in Firefox and Safari.

Patches

The vulnerability has been patched in XWiki 14.10.8 and 15.2 by requiring a CSRF token header for certain request types that are susceptible to CSRF attacks.

Workarounds

It is possible to check for the Origin header in a reverse proxy to protect the REST endpoint from CSRF attacks, see the Jira issue for an example configuration.

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
None
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:N/UI:R/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H

CVE ID

CVE-2023-37277

Weaknesses