CVE-2023-29209
Published: 15 April 2023
Summary
CVE-2023-29209 is a critical-severity Eval Injection (CWE-95) vulnerability in Xwiki Xwiki. Its CVSS base score is 9.9 (Critical).
Operationally, ranked in the top 4.5% of CVEs by exploit likelihood; it is not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog; a public proof-of-concept is referenced.
Deeper analysis
XWiki Commons, the technical libraries used across multiple XWiki projects, contain a code injection vulnerability in the legacy notification activity macro that is installed by default. The root cause is improper escaping of macro parameters, which permits any user able to view commonly accessible documents to execute arbitrary Groovy, Python, or Velocity code and thereby obtain full control of the XWiki installation. The flaw affects all versions prior to 13.10.11, 14.4.7, and 14.10 and can be reached both through direct page editing and indirectly via the HTMLConverter component of the bundled CKEditor integration.
An attacker with view rights on accessible documents, or edit rights on any wiki page including a user profile, can supply malicious macro parameters that are interpreted as executable script. Successful exploitation yields remote code execution with the privileges of the XWiki application, resulting in complete confidentiality, integrity, and availability impact as reflected in the CVSS 9.9 score and the associated CWE-95 and CWE-94 classifications.
The published security advisory and accompanying patches in the XWiki repository state that the issue is resolved by updating to versions 13.10.11, 14.4.7, or 14.10; the fix is tracked under XWIKI-20258 and implemented in commit 9439249. The EPSS score has remained flat at its peak value of 0.1893 since disclosure, indicating no material increase in observed exploitation interest.
EU & UK References
- 🇪🇺 ENISA EUVD: EUVD-2023-1256
Vulnerability details
XWiki Commons are technical libraries common to several other top level XWiki projects. Any user with view rights on commonly accessible documents including the legacy notification activity macro can execute arbitrary Groovy, Python or Velocity code in XWiki leading to…
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full access to the XWiki installation. The root cause is improper escaping of the macro parameters of the legacy notification activity macro. This macro is installed by default in XWiki. The vulnerability can be exploited via every wiki page that is editable including the user's profile, but also with just view rights using the HTMLConverter that is part of the CKEditor integration which is bundled with XWiki. The vulnerability has been patched in XWiki 13.10.11, 14.4.7 and 14.10.
- CWE(s)
Related Threats
No named actor attribution yet. ATT&CK technique mapping in progress for this CVE.
Affected Assets
Mitigating Controls
Likely Mitigating Controls AI
Per-CVE control mapping for this CVE has not run yet; the list below is derived from the weakness types (CWEs) cited in the NVD entry.
Makes persistent code injection into loaded programs impossible when the executable image itself resides on hardware-protected read-only media.
Dynamically generated code can be produced and executed inside the isolated chamber, preventing host compromise from code-injection payloads.
Validates inputs used in dynamic code generation to block injected directives.
Directly prevents execution of attacker-supplied code written into data memory regions.