Confluence Security Advisory 2009-04-15

Confluence Security Overview and Advisories

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In this advisory:

XSS Vulnerability in Various Confluence Macros

Severity

Atlassian rates this vulnerability as high, according to the scale published in Confluence Security. The scale allows us to rank a vulnerability as critical, high, moderate or low.

Risk Assessment

We have identified and fixed two security flaws which may affect Confluence instances in a public environment. These flaws are all cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities in Confluence's Index and Widget Macros. Each vulnerability potentially allows a malicious user (attacker) to embed their own JavaScript into a Confluence page, which will be executed when the page is rendered.

  • The hacker might take advantage of the flaw to steal other users' session cookies or other credentials, by sending the credentials back to the hacker's own web server.
  • The hacker's text and script might be displayed to other people viewing the Confluence page. This is potentially damaging to your company's reputation.

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

Risk Mitigation

We recommend either patching or upgrading your Confluence installation to fix this vulnerability. Please see the 'Fix' section below.

Alternatively if you are not in a position to undertake this immediately and you judge it necessary, you can disable public access (e.g. anonymous access and public signup) to your wiki until you have applied the necessary patch or upgrade. For even tighter control, you could restrict access to trusted groups.

You could also temporarily disable the Widget Connector plugin and the Index Macro module of the Confluence Advanced Macros plugin until you have applied the necessary patch or upgrade. Be aware, however, that this will cause any occurrence of these macros on existing pages or blogs in your Confluence site to render with 'Unknown Macro' indications.

Vulnerability

All versions of Confluence prior to 2.10.3 are vulnerable to this security flaw.

Fix

The fixes include an update to the Index Macro, such that it correctly renders content on the page and an update to the Widget Macro, such that it correctly encodes all parameters passed to it.

To patch your existing installation of Confluence, please refer to CONF-14753 for the Index Macro and CONF-14337 for the Widget Macro. These JIRA issues contain the downloadable patch files and instructions on how to patch your existing Confluence installation.

Alternatively, install or upgrade to Confluence version 2.10.3. (See the release notes.) The Confluence 2.10.3 installation files can be downloaded from the download centre.

For more information, please refer to CONF-14753 and CONF-14337.

Our thanks to Igor Minar, who reported one of the XSS vulnerabilities listed above. We fully support the reporting of vulnerabilities and we appreciate it when people work with us to identify and solve the problem.

HTTP Header Injection Flaw with Attachment Filenames

Severity

Atlassian rates this vulnerability as high, according to the scale published in Confluence Security. The scale allows us to rank a vulnerability as critical, high, moderate or low.

Risk Assessment

We have identified and fixed a security flaw with attachment filenames. This vulnerability could lead to an HTTP Header Injection attack through the upload of attachments with modified filenames designed to exploit this flaw. An attacker could insert malicious code into the HTTP response, which would be executed in the user's session.

  • The attacker may take advantage of this flaw to steal other users' session cookies or other credentials, by sending the credentials back to the attacker's own web server.
  • The attacker could also gain control over the underlying system, based on the privileges of the user whose session cookie has been stolen.
  • The attacker could redirect the user to undesirable web sites. This is potentially damaging to your company's reputation.

Risk Mitigation

We strongly recommend either patching or upgrading your Confluence installation to fix this vulnerability. Please see the 'Fix' section below.

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

Alternatively, you may consider taking the following step, although the time required to fix this vulnerability and the extent of its effectiveness will depend on your application server running Confluence and its configuration:

  • Consult the vendor of your application server to see whether your application server is immune to header injection vulnerabilities or has configuration options to prevent such attacks. For example, the Coyote (HTTP) connector in Tomcat version 5.5 and later is immune to header injection attacks, as acknowledged in this reference.
    Technical note: In your application server, header injection vulnerabilities can be mitigated if the setHeader(), addHeader(), and sendRedirect() methods in the HttpServletResponse class have their parameters properly checked for header termination characters.
    (info) You may wish to forward this technical note to the vendor of your application server to help them assess the vulnerability of your application server to header injection attacks.

Vulnerability

All versions of Confluence prior to 2.10.3 are vulnerable to this security flaw.

Fix

The fix includes a new header-injection prevention filter in Confluence, which ensures attachment filenames or any other user-provided data is correctly encoded before being included in HTTP headers.

To patch your existing installation of Confluence, please refer to CONF-14704. This JIRA issue contains the downloadable patch files and instructions on how to patch your existing Confluence installation.

Alternatively, install or upgrade to Confluence version 2.10.3. (See the release notes.) The Confluence 2.10.3 installation files can be downloaded from the download centre.

For more information, please refer to CONF-14704.

Last modified on Sep 13, 2013

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