LinkAce is a self-hosted archive to collect website links. Versions 2.4.2 and below have a Stored Cross-site Scripting vulnerability through the Atom feed endpoint for lists (/lists/feed). An authenticated user can inject a CDATA-breaking payload into a list description that escapes the XML CDATA section, injects a native SVG element into the Atom XML document, and executes arbitrary JavaScript directly in the browser when the feed URL is visited. No RSS reader or additional rendering context is required — the browsers native XML parser processes the injected SVG and fires the onload event handler. This vulnerability exists because the lists feed template outputs list descriptions using Blades raw syntax ({!! !!}) without sanitization inside a CDATA block. The critical detail is that because the output sits inside , an attacker can inject the sequence ]]> to close the CDATA section prematurely, then inject arbitrary XML/SVG elements that the browser parses and executes natively as part of the Atom document. This issue has been fixed in version 2.4.3.
Weakness
The product receives input from an upstream component, but it does not neutralize or incorrectly neutralizes special characters such as “<”, “>”, and “&” that could be interpreted as web-scripting elements when they are sent to a downstream component that processes web pages.
Potential Mitigations
- Use and specify an output encoding that can be handled by the downstream component that is reading the output. Common encodings include ISO-8859-1, UTF-7, and UTF-8. When an encoding is not specified, a downstream component may choose a different encoding, either by assuming a default encoding or automatically inferring which encoding is being used, which can be erroneous. When the encodings are inconsistent, the downstream component might treat some character or byte sequences as special, even if they are not special in the original encoding. Attackers might then be able to exploit this discrepancy and conduct injection attacks; they even might be able to bypass protection mechanisms that assume the original encoding is also being used by the downstream component.
- The problem of inconsistent output encodings often arises in web pages. If an encoding is not specified in an HTTP header, web browsers often guess about which encoding is being used. This can open up the browser to subtle XSS attacks.
Related Attack Patterns
- https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/18.html
- https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/193.html
- https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/32.html
- https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/86.html