CVE-2020-36624

A vulnerability was found in ahorner text-helpers up to 1.0.x. It has been declared as critical. This vulnerability affects unknown code of the file lib/text_helpers/translation.rb. The manipulation of the argument link leads to use of web link to untrusted target with window.opener access. The attack can be initiated remotely. Upgrading to version 1.1.0 is able to address this issue. The name of the patch is 184b60ded0e43c985788582aca2d1e746f9405a3. It is recommended to upgrade the affected component. The identifier of this vulnerability is VDB-216520.

Weakness

The web application produces links to untrusted external sites outside of its sphere of control, but it does not properly prevent the external site from modifying security-critical properties of the window.opener object, such as the location property.

Affected Software

Potential Mitigations

• When creating a link to an external document using the tag with a defined target, for example “_blank” or a named frame, provide the rel attribute with a value “noopener noreferrer”.
• If opening the external document in a new window via javascript, then reset the opener by setting it equal to null.
• Do not use “_blank” targets. However, this can affect the usability of the application.

References

• https://github.com/ahorner/text-helpers/commit/184b60ded0e43c985788582aca2d1e746f9405a3
• https://github.com/ahorner/text-helpers/pull/19
• https://github.com/ahorner/text-helpers/releases/tag/v1.1.0
• https://vuldb.com/?id.216520