CVE Vulnerabilities

CVE-2023-28442

Exposure of Sensitive Information to an Unauthorized Actor

Published: Mar 24, 2023 | Modified: Nov 07, 2023
CVSS 3.x
5.3
MEDIUM
Source:
NVD
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:N/A:N
CVSS 2.x
RedHat/V2
RedHat/V3
Ubuntu

GeoNode is an open source platform that facilitates the creation, sharing, and collaborative use of geospatial data. Prior to versions 2.20.6, 2.19.6, and 2.18.7, anonymous users can obtain sensitive information about GeoNode configurations from the response of the /geoserver/rest/about/status Geoserver REST API endpoint. The Geoserver endpoint is secured by default, but the configuration of Geoserver for GeoNode opens a list of REST endpoints to support some of its public-facing services. The vulnerability impacts both GeoNode 3 and GeoNode 4 instances.

Geoserver security configuration is provided by geoserver-geonode-ext. A patch for 2.20.7 has been released which blocks access to the affected endpoint. The patch has been backported to branches 2.20.6, 2.19.7, 2.19.6, and 2.18.7. All the published artifacts and Docker images have been updated accordingly. A more advanced patch has been applied to the master and development versions, which require some changes to GeoNode code. They will be available with the next 4.1.0 release. The patched configuration only has an effect on new deployments. For existing setups, the patch must be applied manually inside the Geoserver data directory. The patched file must replace the existing <geoserver_datadir>/security/rest.properties file.

Weakness

The product exposes sensitive information to an actor that is not explicitly authorized to have access to that information.

Affected Software

Name Vendor Start Version End Version
Geonode Geosolutionsgroup * 2.18.7 (excluding)
Geonode Geosolutionsgroup 2.19.0 (including) 2.19.6 (excluding)
Geonode Geosolutionsgroup 2.20.0 (including) 2.20.6 (excluding)

Extended Description

There are many different kinds of mistakes that introduce information exposures. The severity of the error can range widely, depending on the context in which the product operates, the type of sensitive information that is revealed, and the benefits it may provide to an attacker. Some kinds of sensitive information include:

Information might be sensitive to different parties, each of which may have their own expectations for whether the information should be protected. These parties include:

Information exposures can occur in different ways:

It is common practice to describe any loss of confidentiality as an “information exposure,” but this can lead to overuse of CWE-200 in CWE mapping. From the CWE perspective, loss of confidentiality is a technical impact that can arise from dozens of different weaknesses, such as insecure file permissions or out-of-bounds read. CWE-200 and its lower-level descendants are intended to cover the mistakes that occur in behaviors that explicitly manage, store, transfer, or cleanse sensitive information.

Potential Mitigations

  • Compartmentalize the system to have “safe” areas where trust boundaries can be unambiguously drawn. Do not allow sensitive data to go outside of the trust boundary and always be careful when interfacing with a compartment outside of the safe area.
  • Ensure that appropriate compartmentalization is built into the system design, and the compartmentalization allows for and reinforces privilege separation functionality. Architects and designers should rely on the principle of least privilege to decide the appropriate time to use privileges and the time to drop privileges.

References