It was found that Spring MVC processed user-provided XML with JAXB, in combination with a StAX XMLInputFactory, without disabling external entity resolution. A remote attacker could use this flaw to conduct XML External Entity (XXE) attacks on web sites, and read files in the context of the user running the application server. This flaw affects Spring Framework 3.2.x before 3.2.4 and 4.0.0.M1 through 4.0.0.M2.

It was reported [1] that the Spring Framework suffered from several XML External Entity (XXE) flaws:

Versions Affected: - 3.0.0 to 3.2.3 (Spring OXM) - 3.2.0 to 3.2.3 (Spring MVC) - 4.0.0.M1 (Spring OXM) - 4.0.0.M1-4.0.0.M2 (Spring MVC) - Earlier unsupported versions may also be affected

Description: The Spring OXM wrapper did not expose any property for disabling entity resolution when using the JAXB unmarshaller. There are four possible source implementations passed to the unmarshaller: - DOMSource - StAXSource - SAXSource - StreamSource For a DOMSource, the XML has already been parsed by user code and that code is responsible for protecting against XXE. For a StAXSource, the XMLStreamReader has already been created by user code and that code is responsible for protecting against XXE. For SAXSource and StreamSource instances, Spring processed external entities by default thereby creating this vulnerability. The issue was resolved by disabling external entity processing by default and adding an option to enable it for those users that need to use this feature when processing XML from a trusted source.

It was also identified that Spring MVC processed user provided XML with JAXB in combination with a StAX XMLInputFactory without disabling external entity resolution. External entity resolution has been disabled in this case.

Mitigation: Users of affected versions should apply the following mitigation: - Users of 3.x should upgrade to 3.2.4 or later - Users of 4.x should upgrade to 4.0.0.RC1 or later once released Note the Spring OXM issue is fixed in 4.0.0.M2

[1] http://seclists.org/bugtraq/2013/Aug/154

External References:

http://www.gopivotal.com/security/cve-2013-4152 https://github.com/SpringSource/spring-framework/pull/317 https://jira.springsource.org/browse/SPR-10806

Pivotal Spring Framework could allow a remote attacker to obtain sensitive information, caused by an XML External Entity Injection (XXE) error in Jaxb2RootElementHttpMessageConverter when processing XML data. By sending specially-crafted XML data, an attacker could exploit this vulnerability to read arbitrary files and obtain sensitive information.

Pivotal Spring Framework before 3.2.14 and 4.x before 4.1.7 do not properly process inline DTD declarations when DTD is not entirely disabled, which allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (memory consumption and out-of-memory errors) via a crafted XML file.