Vulnerabilities > CVE-2021-21343 - External Control of File Name or Path vulnerability in multiple products

047910
CVSS 7.5 - HIGH
Attack vector
NETWORK
Attack complexity
LOW
Privileges required
NONE
Confidentiality impact
NONE
Integrity impact
HIGH
Availability impact
NONE

Summary

XStream is a Java library to serialize objects to XML and back again. In XStream before version 1.4.16, there is a vulnerability where the processed stream at unmarshalling time contains type information to recreate the formerly written objects. XStream creates therefore new instances based on these type information. An attacker can manipulate the processed input stream and replace or inject objects, that result in the deletion of a file on the local host. No user is affected, who followed the recommendation to setup XStream's security framework with a whitelist limited to the minimal required types. If you rely on XStream's default blacklist of the Security Framework, you will have to use at least version 1.4.16.

Vulnerable Configurations

Part Description Count
Application
Xstream_Project
37
Application
Oracle
26
OS
Debian
3
OS
Fedoraproject
3

Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE)

Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification (CAPEC)

  • Subverting Environment Variable Values
    The attacker directly or indirectly modifies environment variables used by or controlling the target software. The attacker's goal is to cause the target software to deviate from its expected operation in a manner that benefits the attacker.
  • Leverage Alternate Encoding
    This attack leverages the possibility to encode potentially harmful input and submit it to applications not expecting or effective at validating this encoding standard making input filtering difficult.
  • Using Slashes and URL Encoding Combined to Bypass Validation Logic
    This attack targets the encoding of the URL combined with the encoding of the slash characters. An attacker can take advantage of the multiple way of encoding an URL and abuse the interpretation of the URL. An URL may contain special character that need special syntax handling in order to be interpreted. Special characters are represented using a percentage character followed by two digits representing the octet code of the original character (%HEX-CODE). For instance US-ASCII space character would be represented with %20. This is often referred as escaped ending or percent-encoding. Since the server decodes the URL from the requests, it may restrict the access to some URL paths by validating and filtering out the URL requests it received. An attacker will try to craft an URL with a sequence of special characters which once interpreted by the server will be equivalent to a forbidden URL. It can be difficult to protect against this attack since the URL can contain other format of encoding such as UTF-8 encoding, Unicode-encoding, etc.
  • URL Encoding
    This attack targets the encoding of the URL. An attacker can take advantage of the multiple way of encoding an URL and abuse the interpretation of the URL. An URL may contain special character that need special syntax handling in order to be interpreted. Special characters are represented using a percentage character followed by two digits representing the octet code of the original character (%HEX-CODE). For instance US-ASCII space character would be represented with %20. This is often referred as escaped ending or percent-encoding. Since the server decodes the URL from the requests, it may restrict the access to some URL paths by validating and filtering out the URL requests it received. An attacker will try to craft an URL with a sequence of special characters which once interpreted by the server will be equivalent to a forbidden URL. It can be difficult to protect against this attack since the URL can contain other format of encoding such as UTF-8 encoding, Unicode-encoding, etc. The attacker could also subvert the meaning of the URL string request by encoding the data being sent to the server through a GET request. For instance an attacker may subvert the meaning of parameters used in a SQL request and sent through the URL string (See Example section).
  • Manipulating Input to File System Calls
    An attacker manipulates inputs to the target software which the target software passes to file system calls in the OS. The goal is to gain access to, and perhaps modify, areas of the file system that the target software did not intend to be accessible.