JIRA Security Advisory 2008-10-29

In this advisory:


Security vulnerabilities

XSS vulnerability on ViewProfile page

Severity

Atlassian rates this vulnerability as HIGH, according to the scale published in the JIRA Security documentation. This scale allows us to rank a vulnerability as critical, high, moderate or low.

Risk Assessment

We have identified and fixed a security flaw which may affect JIRA instances in a public environment. This flaw is an XSS (cross-site scripting) vulnerability in JIRA's 'ViewProfile' page. This potentially allows a malicious user (hacker) to create a user with special JavaScript in the fullname of the user. If this user was viewed by another user in the ViewProfile page, the special JavaScript would be executed in the user's session.

  • The hacker might take advantage of this flaw to steal other users' session cookies or other credentials, by sending the credentials back to the hacker's own web server.
  • The hacker could also gain control over the underlying system, based on the privileges of the user whose session cookie has been stolen.

Atlassian recommends that you upgrade to JIRA 3.13.1 to fix the vulnerabilities described below.

You can read more about XSS attacks at cgisecurity, CERT and other places on the web.

Risk Mitigation

If you judge it necessary, you can disable public access (i.e. anonymous access and public signup) to your JIRA system until you have applied the necessary patch or upgrade. For even tighter control, you could restrict JIRA access to trusted groups only.

Vulnerability

The 'ViewProfile' page is affected. The user's 'fullname' is not HTML-escaped when the the page is viewed.

Fix

The fix is to HTML-encode the fullname of the user on the 'ViewProfile' page, so that it cannot be used to run special scripts.

This issue has been fixed in JIRA 3.13.1 only. There are no patches available for previous versions of JIRA, for this fix. For more information, please see JIRA Security Advisory 2008-10-29.


Return URL is not HTML escaped

Severity

Atlassian rates this vulnerability as HIGH, according to the scale published in the JIRA Security documentation. This scale allows us to rank a vulnerability as critical, high, moderate or low.

Risk Assessment

We have identified and fixed a security flaw which may affect JIRA instances in a public environment. This flaw is an XSS (cross-site scripting) vulnerability in the returnURL parameter of the URL of a form (e.g. Add Comment). This potentially allows a malicious user (hacker) to hack the URL to insert special JavaScript in the returnURL parameter. A hacker could present the hacked URL to users (e.g. disguised in an email). If any users click the URL, the special JavaScript would be executed in the user's session.

  • The hacker might take advantage of this flaw to steal other users' session cookies or other credentials, by sending the credentials back to the hacker's own web server.
  • The hacker could also gain control over the underlying system, based on the privileges of the user whose session cookie has been stolen.
  • The hacker's text and script might be displayed to other people on any JIRA page which has a form. This is potentially damaging to your company's reputation.

Atlassian recommends that you upgrade to JIRA 3.13.1 to fix the vulnerabilities described below.

You can read more about XSS attacks at cgisecurity, CERT and other places on the web.

Risk Mitigation

If you judge it necessary, you can disable public access (i.e. anonymous access and public signup) to your JIRA system until you have applied the necessary patch or upgrade. For even tighter control, you could restrict JIRA access to trusted groups only.

Vulnerability

All forms in JIRA are affected. The returnURL is not HTML-escaped when the the page is viewed.

Fix

The fix is to HTML-encode the returnURL of form URLs, so that it cannot be used to run special scripts.

This issue has been fixed in JIRA 3.13.1 only. There are no patches available for previous versions of JIRA, for this fix. For more information, please see JIRA Security Advisory 2008-10-29.



Please let us know what you think of the format of this security advisory and the information we have provided.

Last modified on Oct 29, 2008

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