LocalS3 is an Amazon S3 mock service for testing and local development. Prior to version 1.21, the LocalS3 services bucket creation endpoint is vulnerable to XML External Entity (XXE) injection. When processing the CreateBucketConfiguration XML document during bucket creation, the services XML parser is configured to resolve external entities. This allows an attacker to declare an external entity that references an internal URL, which the server will then attempt to fetch when parsing the XML. The vulnerability specifically occurs in the location constraint processing, where the XML parser resolves external entities without proper validation or restrictions. When the external entity is resolved, the server makes an HTTP request to the specified URL and includes the response content in the parsed XML document. This vulnerability can be exploited to perform server-side request forgery (SSRF) attacks, allowing an attacker to make requests to internal services or resources that should not be accessible from external networks. The server will include the responses from these internal requests in the resulting bucket configuration, effectively leaking sensitive information. The attacker only needs to be able to send HTTP requests to the LocalS3 service to exploit this vulnerability.
The product processes an XML document that can contain XML entities with URIs that resolve to documents outside of the intended sphere of control, causing the product to embed incorrect documents into its output.
XML documents optionally contain a Document Type Definition (DTD), which, among other features, enables the definition of XML entities. It is possible to define an entity by providing a substitution string in the form of a URI. The XML parser can access the contents of this URI and embed these contents back into the XML document for further processing. By submitting an XML file that defines an external entity with a file:// URI, an attacker can cause the processing application to read the contents of a local file. For example, a URI such as “file:///c:/winnt/win.ini” designates (in Windows) the file C:\Winnt\win.ini, or file:///etc/passwd designates the password file in Unix-based systems. Using URIs with other schemes such as http://, the attacker can force the application to make outgoing requests to servers that the attacker cannot reach directly, which can be used to bypass firewall restrictions or hide the source of attacks such as port scanning. Once the content of the URI is read, it is fed back into the application that is processing the XML. This application may echo back the data (e.g. in an error message), thereby exposing the file contents.