XML External Entity (XXE) Injection Affecting org.eclipse.kura:kura package, versions [,4.1.0)


0.0
medium

Snyk CVSS

    Attack Complexity High

    Threat Intelligence

    EPSS 0.14% (49th percentile)
Expand this section
NVD
7.5 high

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  • Snyk ID SNYK-JAVA-ORGECLIPSEKURA-174171
  • published 9 Apr 2019
  • disclosed 9 Apr 2019
  • credit Matteo Maiero

How to fix?

Upgrade org.eclipse.kura:kura to version 4.1.0 or higher.

Overview

org.eclipse.kura:kura is an OSGi-based Application Framework for M2M Service Gateways.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to XML External Entity (XXE) Injection. The Web UI package and component services, the Artemis simple mqtt component and the emulator position service (not part of the device distribution) could potentially be target of XXE attack due to an improper factory and parser initialisation.

Details

XXE Injection is a type of attack against an application that parses XML input. XML is a markup language that defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. By default, many XML processors allow specification of an external entity, a URI that is dereferenced and evaluated during XML processing. When an XML document is being parsed, the parser can make a request and include the content at the specified URI inside of the XML document.

Attacks can include disclosing local files, which may contain sensitive data such as passwords or private user data, using file: schemes or relative paths in the system identifier.

For example, below is a sample XML document, containing an XML element- username.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
   <username>John</username>
</xml>

An external XML entity - xxe, is defined using a system identifier and present within a DOCTYPE header. These entities can access local or remote content. For example the below code contains an external XML entity that would fetch the content of /etc/passwd and display it to the user rendered by username.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<!DOCTYPE foo [
   <!ENTITY xxe SYSTEM "file:///etc/passwd" >]>
   <username>&xxe;</username>
</xml>

Other XXE Injection attacks can access local resources that may not stop returning data, possibly impacting application availability and leading to Denial of Service.