Vulnerabilities > CVE-2021-32796 - XML Injection (aka Blind XPath Injection) vulnerability in Xmldom Project Xmldom

047910
CVSS 5.3 - MEDIUM
Attack vector
NETWORK
Attack complexity
LOW
Privileges required
NONE
Confidentiality impact
NONE
Integrity impact
LOW
Availability impact
NONE
network
low complexity
xmldom-project
CWE-91

Summary

xmldom is an open source pure JavaScript W3C standard-based (XML DOM Level 2 Core) DOMParser and XMLSerializer module. xmldom versions 0.6.0 and older do not correctly escape special characters when serializing elements removed from their ancestor. This may lead to unexpected syntactic changes during XML processing in some downstream applications. This issue has been resolved in version 0.7.0. As a workaround downstream applications can validate the input and reject the maliciously crafted documents.

Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE)

Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification (CAPEC)

  • XML Injection
    An attacker utilizes crafted XML user-controllable input to probe, attack, and inject data into the XML database, using techniques similar to SQL injection. The user-controllable input can allow for unauthorized viewing of data, bypassing authentication or the front-end application for direct XML database access, and possibly altering database information.
  • XPath Injection
    An attacker can craft special user-controllable input consisting of XPath expressions to inject the XML database and bypass authentication or glean information that he normally would not be able to. XPath Injection enables an attacker to talk directly to the XML database, thus bypassing the application completely. XPath Injection results from the failure of an application to properly sanitize input used as part of dynamic XPath expressions used to query an XML database. In order to successfully inject XML and retrieve information from a database, an attacker: