CVE-2023-40572

XWiki Platform is a generic wiki platform offering runtime services for applications built on top of it. The create action is vulnerable to a CSRF attack, allowing script and thus remote code execution when targeting a user with script/programming right, thus compromising the confidentiality, integrity and availability of the whole XWiki installation. When a user with script right views this image and a log message ERROR foo - Script executed! appears in the log, the XWiki installation is vulnerable. This has been patched in XWiki 14.10.9 and 15.4RC1 by requiring a CSRF token for the actual page creation.

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

• https://github.com/xwiki/xwiki-platform/commit/4b20528808d0c311290b0d9ab2cfc44063380ef7
• https://github.com/xwiki/xwiki-platform/security/advisories/GHSA-4f8m-7h83-9f6m
• https://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XWIKI-20849