CVE-2025-48063

XWiki is a generic wiki platform. In XWiki 16.10.0, required rights were introduced as a way to limit which rights a document can have. Part of the security model of required rights is that a user who doesnt have a right also cannot define that right as required right. That way, users who are editing documents on which required rights are enforced can be sure that theyre not giving a right to a script or object that it didnt have before. A bug in the implementation of the enforcement of this rule means that in fact, it was possible for any user with edit right on a document to set programming right as required right. If then a user with programming right edited that document, the content of that document would gain programming right, allowing remote code execution. This thereby defeats most of the security benefits of required rights. As XWiki still performs the required rights analysis when a user edits a page even when required rights are enforced, the user with programming right would still be warned about the dangerous content unless the attacker managed to bypass this check. Note also that none of the affected versions include a UI for enabling the enforcing of required rights so it seems unlikely that anybody relied on them for security in the affected versions. As this vulnerability provides no additional attack surface unless all documents in the wiki enforce required rights, we consider the impact of this attack to be low even though gaining programming right could have a high impact. This vulnerability has been patched in XWiki 16.10.4 and 17.1.0RC1. No known workarounds are available except for upgrading.

Weakness

The product does not perform or incorrectly performs an authorization check when an actor attempts to access a resource or perform an action.

Extended Description

Assuming a user with a given identity, authorization is the process of determining whether that user can access a given resource, based on the user’s privileges and any permissions or other access-control specifications that apply to the resource. When access control checks are not applied consistently - or not at all - users are able to access data or perform actions that they should not be allowed to perform. This can lead to a wide range of problems, including information exposures, denial of service, and arbitrary code execution.

Potential Mitigations

• Divide the product into anonymous, normal, privileged, and administrative areas. Reduce the attack surface by carefully mapping roles with data and functionality. Use role-based access control (RBAC) to enforce the roles at the appropriate boundaries.
• Note that this approach may not protect against horizontal authorization, i.e., it will not protect a user from attacking others with the same role.
• 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, consider using authorization frameworks such as the JAAS Authorization Framework [REF-233] and the OWASP ESAPI Access Control feature [REF-45].
• For web applications, make sure that the access control mechanism is enforced correctly at the server side on every page. Users should not be able to access any unauthorized functionality or information by simply requesting direct access to that page.
• One way to do this is to ensure that all pages containing sensitive information are not cached, and that all such pages restrict access to requests that are accompanied by an active and authenticated session token associated with a user who has the required permissions to access that page.

Related Attack Patterns

• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/1.html
• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/104.html
• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/127.html
• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/13.html
• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/17.html
• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/39.html
• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/402.html
• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/45.html
• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/5.html
• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/51.html
• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/59.html
• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/60.html
• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/647.html
• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/668.html
• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/76.html
• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/77.html
• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/87.html

References

• https://github.com/xwiki/xwiki-platform/commit/2557813aef3b863988d6cca58de996e207086898
• https://github.com/xwiki/xwiki-platform/security/advisories/GHSA-rhfv-688c-p6hp
• https://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XWIKI-22859
• https://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XWIKI-22859