Spring Security Advisories

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XML External Entity (XXE) injection when using Spring MVC

HIGH | MAY 28, 2014 | CVE-2014-0225

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 Framework:

  • 4.0.0 - 4.0.4
  • 3.2.8 and earlier

Mitigation

Users of affected versions should upgrade to the corresponding fixed version.
Fix versionAvailability
4.0.5OSS
3.2.9OSS

No further mitigation steps are necessary.

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

History

  • 2014-05-28: Initial vulnerability report published.
  • 2014-09-05: Updated to add that a full XXE attack is possible and to increase severity from moderate to important as a result.

Reporting a vulnerability

To report a security vulnerability for a project within the Spring portfolio, see the Security Policy

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