Description

When a programmer does not specify the action on the Spring form, Spring automatically populates the action field with the requested uri. An attacker can use this to inject malicious content into the form.

Affected Spring Products and Versions

• Spring MVC 3.0.0 to 3.2.7
• Spring MVC 4.0.0 to 4.0.1
• Earlier unsupported versions may be affected

Mitigation

Users of affected versions should apply the following mitigation:

• Users of 3.x should upgrade to 3.2.8 or later
• Users of 4.x should upgrade to 4.0.2 or later

Credit

This issue was discovered and reported responsibly to the Pivotal security team by Paul Wowk of CAaNES LLC.

References

• https://jira.springsource.org/browse/SPR-11426
• https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-framework/commit/741b4b229ae032bd17175b46f98673ce0bd2d485
• https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-framework/commit/75e08695a04980dbceae6789364717e9d8764d58#diff-5c29d6685335045274d9908c5cd45e45

History

2014-Mar-11: Initial vulnerability report published.

• 2014-Aug-19: Correct affected versions to exclude Spring MVC 3.2.8 and include a reference to the 3.2.x commit.