Confluence Security Advisory 2009-12-08
In this advisory:
XSS Vulnerability in Various Confluence Actions and Macros
Severity
Atlassian rates these vulnerabilities as high, according to the scale published in Severity Levels for Security Issues. The scale allows us to rank a vulnerability as critical, high, moderate or low.
Risk Assessment
We have identified and fixed a number of security vulnerabilities which may affect Confluence instances in a public environment. These flaws are cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities that could occur when creating a page or blog post in a personal space, using the indexbrowser.jsp form and when using the gallery macro.
- 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
Page or blog post creation in a personal space | 2.10 – 3.0.2 | 3.0.0 – 3.1 inclusive | |
Using the | All versions prior to and including 3.0.2 | 3.0.0 – 3.1 inclusive | |
Gallery macro | 2.9 – 3.0.2 | 3.0.0 – 3.1 inclusive | |
Page tree and page tree search macros | 2.9 – 3.0.2 | 2.8 – 3.1 inclusive | |
Status updates tab of the user profile area | 3.0.0 – 3.0.2 | 3.0.0 – 3.1 inclusive |
Fix
These issues have been fixed in Confluence 3.1 (see the release notes), which you can download from the download centre.
If you do not wish to upgrade to Confluence 3.1, you can patch your existing installation by upgrading the plugins for these macros via the Confluence Plugin Repository to the version indicated in the JIRA issues listed in the vulnerability section (above).