Description

When processing user provided XML documents, the Spring Framework did not disable by default the resolution of URI references in a DTD declaration. This enabled an XXE attack.

Affected Spring Products and Versions

• Spring MVC 3.0.0 to 3.2.8
• Spring MVC 4.0.0 to 4.0.4
• Earlier unsupported versions may be affected

Mitigation

Users of affected versions should apply the following mitigation:

• Users of 3.x should upgrade to 3.2.9 or later
• Users of 4.x should upgrade to 4.0.5 or later

Credit

This issue was discovered and reported responsibly to the Pivotal security team by Nebula(XIAOBAISHAN,CHIBI,HUBEI.CN) HelloWorld security team, DBappsecurity.com security team. Additional information demonstrating how a full XXE attack could be made was provided by David Jorm of the RedHat security team.

References

• https://jira.spring.io/browse/SPR-11768
• https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-framework/commit/8e096aeef55287dc829484996c9330cf755891a1
• https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-framework/commit/c6503ebbf7c9e21ff022c58706dbac5417b2b5eb

History

2014-May-28: Initial vulnerability report published.

• 2014-September-05: Updated to add that a full XXE attack is possible and to increase severity from moderate to important as a result.