Confluence Security Advisory 2008-03-19
In this advisory:
XSS Vulnerabilities in Various Confluence Actions
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 security flaws which may affect Confluence instances in a public environment. The flaws are all XSS (cross-site scripting) vulnerabilities in various Confluence actions. Each vulnerability potentially allows a malicious user (hacker) to embed their own JavaScript into a Confluence page.
- The hacker might take advantage of the flaw to steal other users' session cookies or other credentials, by sending the credentials back to the hacker's own web server.
- The hacker's text and script might be displayed to other people viewing the Confluence page. This is potentially damaging to your company's reputation.
To fix the vulnerabilities described below, Atlassian recommends that you take one of the following steps:
- Upgrade to Confluence 2.7.3, or
- Download and install the patches for Confluence 2.6.x from our JIRA site — refer to the list of issues below.
You can read more about XSS attacks at cgisecurity, CERT and other places on the web.
Risk Mitigation
If 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 only.
Vulnerability
A hacker 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.
For more details please refer to the related JIRA issue, also shown in the table below.
Confluence Actions | Affected Confluence Versions | More Details | Reporter |
|---|---|---|---|
Create, edit or copy a page or news item | From 2.2 to 2.7.2 inclusive |
| |
Add a comment | From 2.2 to 2.7.2 inclusive |
| |
Create a space | From 2.2 to 2.7.2 inclusive | Wyatt Crossin | |
Sign up for an account | From 2.2 to 2.7.2 inclusive |
| |
Choose a page (page picker) | From 2.2 to 2.7.2 inclusive |
| |
View a user | From 2.2 to 2.7.2 inclusive |
| |
Insert an image or link | From 2.2 to 2.7.2 inclusive |
| |
Choose a user or group (user picker and group picker) | From 2.2 to 2.7.2 inclusive | Jean Marois | |
Add a user to favourites | From 2.0 to 2.7.2 inclusive |
| |
HTTP 500 error page | From 1.3 to 2.7.2 inclusive |
| |
Add bookmark | All Confluence instances that have the Social Bookmarking plugin. |
|
Fix
These issues have been fixed in Confluence 2.7.3 (see the release notes), which you can download from the download centre.
Patches are available for Confluence 2.6.x. For more information, please refer to the specific JIRA issues shown in the table of vulnerabilities above.
Our thanks to the people who reported some of the vulnerabilities listed above. We fully support the reporting of vulnerabilities and we appreciate their working with us towards identifying and solving the problem.