XXE with Spring Data’s XMLBeam integration

HIGH | MAY 09, 2018 | CVE-2018-1259

Description

Spring Data Commons, versions prior to 1.13 to 1.13.11 and 2.0 to 2.0.6 used in combination with XMLBeam 1.4.14 or earlier versions contain a property binder vulnerability caused by improper restriction of XML external entity references as underlying library XMLBeam does not restrict external reference expansion. An unauthenticated remote malicious user can supply specially crafted request parameters against Spring Data’s projection-based request payload binding to access arbitrary files on the system.

Affected Spring Products and Versions

Spring Data Commons:

2.0.0 - 2.0.6
1.13.0 - 1.13.11

Mitigation

Users of affected versions should upgrade to the corresponding fixed version.

Fix version	Availability
2.0.7	OSS
1.13.12	OSS

Alternatively, upgrade to XMLBeam 1.4.15
Spring Data REST 2.6.12 (Ingalls SR12)
Spring Data REST 3.0.7 (Kay SR7)

There are no other mitigation steps necessary.

Note that the vulnerability is only exploitable when using XMLBeam. The use of authentication and authorization for endpoints, both of which are provided by Spring Security, limits exposure to this vulnerability to authorized users.