In Eclipse Ditto versions [1.3.0, 3.9.6], the ImplicitThingCreationMessageMapper of the connectivity service builds a CreateThing command by substituting placeholder values (e.g. {{ header:deviceid }}) resolved from inbound message headers into a pre-configured JSON "thing" template as raw, un-escaped strings, and then parses the resulting string as JSON. Because the placeholder engine performs no JSON escaping and is unaware of the surrounding JSON string context, a resolved value containing a double-quote character can break out of its string and inject additional JSON structure.

When a connection is configured to use this mapper with a template that reflects a header whose value a publishing device can control (for example an MQTT 5 user property, an AMQP 1.0 application property, or a Kafka record header), an attacker able to publish on that connection can inject an inline policy object. The inline policy overrides the administrator-configured policyId, letting the attacker assign an arbitrary access-control policy to the newly created digital twin — gaining full read/write access to it and potentially revoking the legitimate owner's access, with no administrator interaction.

Exploitation requires all of the following: the connection uses the (non-default) ImplicitThingCreation mapper; its template reflects an attacker-controllable header; and, for the policy-override impact, the connection's authorization subjects are permitted to create policies (the default). Deployments that restrict the connection's subjects to thing creation only via the entity-creation configuration are not affected by the policy-override impact.

In Eclipse Ditto starting in version 3.0.0 and prior to versions 3.4.5 and 3.5.6, the user input of several input fields of the Eclipse Ditto Explorer User Interface https://eclipse.dev/ditto/user-interface.html was not properly neutralized and thus vulnerable to both Reflected and Stored XSS (Cross Site Scripting).

Several inputs were not persisted at the backend of Eclipse Ditto, but only in local browser storage to save settings of "environments" of the UI and e.g. the last performed "search queries", resulting in a "Reflected XSS" vulnerability.

However, several other inputs were persisted at the backend of Eclipse Ditto, leading to a "Stored XSS" vulnerability. Those mean that authenticated and authorized users at Eclipse Ditto can persist Things in Ditto which can - when being displayed by other users also being authorized to see those Things in the Eclipse Ditto UI - cause scripts to be executed in the browser of other users.