CVE-2013-4152 XML eXternal Entity (XXE) injection in Spring Framework

HIGH | AUGUST 22, 2013 | CVE-2013-4152

Description

The Spring OXM wrapper did not expose any property for disabling entity resolution when using the JAXB unmarshaller. There are four possible source implementations passed to the unmarshaller: DOMSource, StAXSource, SAXSource and StreamSource.

For a DOMSource, the XML has already been parsed by user code and that code is responsible for protecting against XXE.

For a StAXSource, the XMLStreamReader has already been created by user code and that code is responsible for protecting against XXE.

For SAXSource and StreamSource instances, Spring processed external entities by default thereby creating this vulnerability.

The issue was resolved by disabling external entity processing by default and adding an option to enable it for those users that need to use this feature when processing XML from a trusted source.

Affected Spring Products and Versions

3.0.0 to 3.2.3
4.0.0.M1
Earlier unsupported versions may be affected

Mitigation

Users of affected versions should apply the following mitigation:

Users of 3.x should upgrade to 3.2.4 or later
Users of 4.x should upgrade to 4.0.0.M2 or later

Credit

These issues were identified by Alvaro Munoz of the HP Enterprise Security Team.

History

2013-Aug-22: Initial vulnerability report published.
2014-Jun-19: Updated to remove Spring MVC aspects which have been split off into CVE-2013-7315

Reporting a vulnerability

The VMware Security Response team provides a single point of contact for the reporting of security vulnerabilities in VMware Tanzu products and coordinates the process of investigating any reported vulnerabilities.

To report a security vulnerability in a VMware service or product please refer to the VMware Security Response Policy.