Confluence Security Advisory 2009-08-20
In this advisory:
Privilege Escalation Vulnerability in Profile Picture Handling
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 a privilege escalation vulnerability, which could provide an attacker with access to administrative areas and functions of Confluence when specifying a profile picture. Under some circumstances, the attacker could gain access to Confluence administrative functions that they are not authorised to use.
Risk Mitigation
To address the issue, you should upgrade to Confluence 3.0.1 as soon as possible or follow the patch instructions in the Fix section below. If you judge it necessary, you can disable public signup to your wiki until you have applied the necessary patch or have performed the upgrade. For even tighter control, you could also restrict access to trusted groups or additionally, disable anonymous access until your system is patched or upgraded.
Vulnerability
The profile picture handling feature in all versions of Confluence up to 3.0.0 are affected by this issue. However, the Form Token Handling mechanism available in Confluence 3.0.0 and later means that the administrative areas in these versions of Confluence cannot be compromised by this vulnerability.
Fix
This issue has been fixed in Confluence 3.0.1 (see the release notes), which you can download from the download centre.
If you do not wish to upgrade to Confluence 3.0.1 and you are running Confluence 2.10.x, you can download and install the patches provided on our JIRA site. We strongly recommend that you upgrade to the latest point release (2.10.3) before applying the patch. For more information, please refer to CONF-16141.
Our thanks to Elliot Kendall of Emory University, who reported this vulnerability. We fully support the reporting of vulnerabilities and we appreciate it when people work with us to identify and solve the problem.
XSS Vulnerability in Various Page and Blog Post Features and Functions
Severity
Atlassian rates these vulnerabilities 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 number of XSS vulnerabilities in various Confluence page/blog features and functions, which may affect Confluence instances in a public environment.
XSS vulnerabilities potentially allow a malicious user (attacker) to embed their own JavaScript into a Confluence page.
- The attacker might take advantage of the vulnerability to steal other users' session cookies or other credentials, by sending the credentials back to the attacker's own web server.
- The attacker'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 these vulnerabilities. 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.
Vulnerability
An attacker can inject their own JavaScript into the Confluence actions listed in the table below. Each of the actions is invoked when a user performs a specific function in Confluence, such as clicking a link or a button. The actions can also be invoked by simply entering the URL into the browser address bar. The rogue JavaScript will be executed when a user invokes the URL.
For more details please refer to the related JIRA issue, also shown in the table below.
Confluence action | Affected Confluence Versions | Fix Availability | More Details |
|---|---|---|---|
Clicking a username link | 3.0.0 | 3.0.0 and 3.0.1 | |
Moving pages between spaces | 2.8 to 2.10.3 inclusive | 2.10.x and 3.0.1 | |
Entering content into the WebDAV Configuration page | 3.0.0 | 2.10.x, 3.0.0 and 3.0.1 | |
Entering content into the PDF Export Stylesheet | 3.0.0 | 3.0.0 and 3.0.1 |
* Applying the patch for one of these issues fixes the other.
Fix
These issues have been fixed in Confluence 3.0.1 (see the release notes), which you can download from the download centre.
If you do not wish to upgrade to Confluence 3.0.1, you can patch your existing installation by downloading and installing the patched files provided on our JIRA site. For the WebDAV plugin vulnerability, this would involve upgrading the version of the plugin. We strongly recommend that you upgrade to the latest point release of the major version of Confluence that you are running before applying the patches. For example, if you are running Confluence 2.10.1, you should upgrade to version 2.10.3 and then apply the patches. For more information, please refer to the specific JIRA issues shown in the table of vulnerabilities above.