XML External Entity (XXE) Injection Affecting org.jenkins-ci.plugins.m2release:m2release package, versions [,0.16.2)


Severity

Recommended
0.0
high
0
10

CVSS assessment made by Snyk's Security Team. Learn more

Threat Intelligence

EPSS
0.09% (40th percentile)

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-JAVA-ORGJENKINSCIPLUGINSM2RELEASE-6056516
  • published20 Dec 2019
  • disclosed17 Dec 2019
  • creditCheng Gao, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Security Team, https://www.aliyun.com/

Introduced: 17 Dec 2019

CVE-2019-16550  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-611  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

Upgrade org.jenkins-ci.plugins.m2release:m2release to version 0.16.2 or higher.

Overview

org.jenkins-ci.plugins.m2release:m2release is a plugin for performing a maven release builds from within Jenkins.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to XML External Entity (XXE) Injection. While Jenkins users without Overall/Administer permission are not allowed to configure a custom Nexus URL, this could still be exploited via man-in-the-middle attacks, especially if it’s not an HTTPS URL. Additionally, a connection test form validation method does not require POST requests, resulting in a cross-site request forgery vulnerability. Combined, these two vulnerabilities allow attackers to have Jenkins parse crafted XML documents that use external entities for extraction of secrets from the Jenkins master, server-side request forgery, or denial-of-service attacks.

NOTE: This vulnerability has also been identified as: CVE-2019-16549

Details

XXE Injection is a type of attack against an application that parses XML input. XML is a markup language that defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. By default, many XML processors allow specification of an external entity, a URI that is dereferenced and evaluated during XML processing. When an XML document is being parsed, the parser can make a request and include the content at the specified URI inside of the XML document.

Attacks can include disclosing local files, which may contain sensitive data such as passwords or private user data, using file: schemes or relative paths in the system identifier.

For example, below is a sample XML document, containing an XML element- username.

<xml>
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
   <username>John</username>
</xml>

An external XML entity - xxe, is defined using a system identifier and present within a DOCTYPE header. These entities can access local or remote content. For example the below code contains an external XML entity that would fetch the content of /etc/passwd and display it to the user rendered by username.

<xml>
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<!DOCTYPE foo [
   <!ENTITY xxe SYSTEM "file:///etc/passwd" >]>
   <username>&xxe;</username>
</xml>

Other XXE Injection attacks can access local resources that may not stop returning data, possibly impacting application availability and leading to Denial of Service.

CVSS Scores

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