CVE-2013-6429

The SourceHttpMessageConverter in Spring MVC in Spring Framework before 3.2.5 and 4.0.0.M1 through 4.0.0.RC1 does not disable external entity resolution, which allows remote attackers to read arbitrary files, cause a denial of service, and conduct CSRF attacks via crafted XML, aka an XML External Entity (XXE) issue, and a different vulnerability than CVE-2013-4152 and CVE-2013-7315.

Weakness

The web application does not, or can not, sufficiently verify whether a well-formed, valid, consistent request was intentionally provided by the user who submitted the request.

Affected Software

Potential Mitigations

• Use a vetted library or framework that does not allow this weakness to occur or provides constructs that make this weakness easier to avoid.
• For example, use anti-CSRF packages such as the OWASP CSRFGuard. [REF-330]
• Another example is the ESAPI Session Management control, which includes a component for CSRF. [REF-45]
• Use the “double-submitted cookie” method as described by Felten and Zeller:
• When a user visits a site, the site should generate a pseudorandom value and set it as a cookie on the user’s machine. The site should require every form submission to include this value as a form value and also as a cookie value. When a POST request is sent to the site, the request should only be considered valid if the form value and the cookie value are the same.
• Because of the same-origin policy, an attacker cannot read or modify the value stored in the cookie. To successfully submit a form on behalf of the user, the attacker would have to correctly guess the pseudorandom value. If the pseudorandom value is cryptographically strong, this will be prohibitively difficult.
• This technique requires Javascript, so it may not work for browsers that have Javascript disabled. [REF-331]

Related Attack Patterns

• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/111.html
• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/462.html
• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/467.html
• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/62.html

References

• http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2014-0400.html
• http://secunia.com/advisories/57915
• http://www.gopivotal.com/security/cve-2013-6429
• http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/530770/100/0/threaded
• http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/64947
• https://h20566.www2.hpe.com/portal/site/hpsc/public/kb/docDisplay?docId=emr_na-c05324755
• https://jira.springsource.org/browse/SPR-11078?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:worklog-tabpanel