Session Fixation vulnerabilities allow an attacker to fix a users session identifier before login providing an opportunity for session takeover on a product.  Affected products:

ABB ASPECT - Enterprise v3.08.02; NEXUS Series v3.08.02; MATRIX Series v3.08.02

Default Credentail vulnerabilities allows access to an Aspect device using publicly available default credentials since the system does not require the installer to change default credentials.  Affected products:

ABB ASPECT - Enterprise v3.07.02; NEXUS Series v3.07.02; MATRIX Series v3.07.02

Default Credentail vulnerabilities in ASPECT on Linux allows access to the product using publicly available default credentials.  Affected products:

ABB ASPECT - Enterprise v3.07.02; NEXUS Series v3.07.02; MATRIX Series v3.07.02

Data Validation / Data Sanitization vulnerabilities in Linux allows unvalidated and unsanitized data to be injected in an Aspect device.  Affected products:

ABB ASPECT - Enterprise v3.08.02; NEXUS Series v3.08.02; MATRIX Series v3.08.02

Server-Side Request Forgery vulnerabilities were found providing a potential for access to unauthorized resources and unintended information disclosure.  Affected products:

ABB ASPECT - Enterprise v3.08.02; NEXUS Series v3.08.02; MATRIX Series v3.08.02

Default Credentail vulnerabilities in ASPECT on Linux allows access to the product using publicly available default credentials.  Affected products:

ABB ASPECT - Enterprise v3.08.02; NEXUS Series v3.08.02; MATRIX Series v3.08.02

The olmsessiondescribe function in Matrix libolm before 3.2.7 is vulnerable to a buffer overflow. The Olm session object represents a cryptographic channel between two parties. Therefore, its state is partially controllable by the remote party of the channel. Attackers can construct a crafted sequence of messages to manipulate the state of the receiver's session in such a way that, for some buffer sizes, a buffer overflow happens on a call to olmsessiondescribe. Furthermore, safe buffer sizes were undocumented. The overflow content is partially controllable by the attacker and limited to ASCII spaces and digits. The known affected products are Element Web And SchildiChat Web.

Matrix libolm before 3.2.3 allows a malicious Matrix homeserver to crash a client (while it is attempting to retrieve an Olm encrypted room key backup from the homeserver) because olmpkdecrypt has a stack-based buffer overflow. Remote code execution might be possible for some nonstandard build configurations.

Matrix Synapse before 1.5.0 mishandles signature checking on some federation APIs. Events sent over /sendjoin, /sendleave, and /invite may not be correctly signed, or may not come from the expected servers.

Impact

It is possible to craft a command with newlines which would not be properly parsed. This would mean you could pass a string of commands as a channel name, which would then be run by the IRC bridge bot.

Patches

Versions 1.0.1 and above are patched.

Workarounds

There are no robust workarounds to the bug. You can disable dynamic channels in the config to disable the most common execution method but others may exist. It is highly recommended to upgrade the bridge.

Credits

Discovered and reported by Val Lorentz.

For more information

If you have any questions or comments about this advisory email us at security@matrix.org.

2nd Order SQL injection vulnerabilities in ASPECT allow unintended access and manipulation of database repositories if administrator credentials become compromised.This issue affects ASPECT-Enterprise: through 3.; NEXUS Series: through 3.; MATRIX Series: through 3..

Impact

If configured to send emails using TLS, Sydent does not verify SMTP servers' certificates. This makes Sydent's emails vulnerable to interception via a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack. Attackers with privileged access to the network can intercept room invitations and address confirmation emails.

CVSS 3.1 overall score: 3.3 - AV:A/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:N/CR:L/IR:L/AR:X/MAV:A/MAC:H/MPR:N/MUI:N/MS:C/MC:L/MI:L/MA:N

Reported by Martin Schobert, Pentagrid AG.

Details

Sydent can be configured to send emails over a TLS-encrypted socket by setting

yaml email: tlsmode: "TLS" # or the legacy value "SSL"

in its config file. Alternatively it can be configured to use Opportunistic TLS by setting

yaml email: tlsmode: "STARTTLS"

In both situations, Sydent will encrypt its communication with the SMTP server when sending emails. In affected versions, Sydent will not verify the destination server's certificate.

Vulnerability

Sydent sends email for two purposes: - to inform a third party that they have been invited to a Matrix room by their email address; and - to verify that a given Matrix user controls an email address.

Therefore, attackers capable of running a MITM attack can

1. Intercept room invitations sent to an email address. The invitation includes - the room ID and its avatar, and - the inviter's username, displayname and their avatar, and - credentials for a guest Matrix account on the inviter's homeserver. 2. Intercept address ownership confirmation emails. This would allow the attacker to falsely claim ownership of the indented recipient's Matrix account, if that account was permitted to log in using an email address and no other authentication factors.

Patches

This is patched in Sydent 2.5.6, see PR https://github.com/matrix-org/sydent/pull/574.

When patching, make sure that Sydent trusts the certificate of the server it is connecting to. This should happen automatically when using properly issued certificates. If you are using self-signed certificates, make sure to copy your Certification Authority certificate, or your self signed certificate if using only one, to the trust store of your operating system.

Workarounds

One can ensure Sydent's emails fail to send by setting the configured SMTP server to a loopback or non-routable address under your control which does not have a listening SMTP server. For example:

yaml email: smtphost: "localhost" # Assuming there is no SMTP server listening on localhost

References

- https://github.com/matrix-org/sydent/pull/574 implements the fix. - https://github.com/matrix-org/sydent/releases/tag/v2.5.6 is the release including this fix. - https://docs.python.org/3/library/ssl.html?highlight=ssl#security-considerations details the best-practice advice on how to use the standard library smtp module safely. - https://peps.python.org/pep-0476/ (accepted) proposed enabling TLS certificate verification by default in standard library HTTP clients. - https://github.com/python/cpython/issues/91826 discusses enabling TLS certificate verification by default in the Python standard library, for SMTP and other protocols.

For more information

If you have any questions or comments about this advisory, e-mail us at security@matrix.org.

Impact

In Synapse versions before 1.120.1, enabling the dynamicthumbnails option or processing a specially crafted request could trigger the decoding and thumbnail generation of uncommon image formats, potentially invoking external tools like Ghostscript for processing.

This significantly expands the attack surface in a historically vulnerable area, presenting a risk that far outweighs the benefit, particularly since these formats are rarely used on the open web or within the Matrix ecosystem.

For a list of image formats, as well as decoding libraries and helper programs used, see the Pillow documentation.

Patches

Synapse 1.120.1 addresses the issue by restricting thumbnail generation to images in the following widely used formats: PNG, JPEG, GIF, and WebP.

Workarounds

- Ensure any image codecs and helper programs, such as Ghostscript, are patched against security vulnerabilities. - Uninstall unused image decoder libraries and helper programs, such as Ghostscript, from the system environment that Synapse is running in. - Depending on the installation method, there may be some decoder libraries bundled with Pillow and these cannot be easily uninstalled. - The official Docker container image does not include Ghostscript.

References

- The Pillow documentation includes a list of supported image formats and which libraries or helper programs are used to decode them.

For more information

If you have any questions or comments about this advisory, please email us at security at element.io.

matrix-hookshot is a Matrix bot for connecting to external services like GitHub, GitLab, JIRA, and more. Instances that have enabled transformation functions (those that have generic.allowJsTransformationFunctions in their config), may be vulnerable to an attack where it is possible to break out of the vm2 sandbox and as a result Hookshot will be vulnerable to this. This problem is only likely to affect users who have allowed untrusted users to apply their own transformation functions. If you have only enabled a limited set of trusted users, this threat is reduced (though not eliminated). Version 4.5.0 and above of hookshot include a new sandbox library which should better protect users. Users are advised to upgrade. Users unable to upgrade should disable generic.allowJsTransformationFunctions in the config.

Service Control vulnerabilities allow access to service restart requests and vm configuration settings.  Affected products:

ABB ASPECT - Enterprise v3.08.02; NEXUS Series v3.08.02; MATRIX Series v3.08.02

Matrix Synapse before 0.33.3.1 allows remote attackers to spoof events and possibly have unspecified other impacts by leveraging improper transaction and event signature validation.

matrix-appservice-irc is a Node.js IRC bridge for Matrix. The vulnerability in node-irc allows an attacker to manipulate a Matrix user into executing IRC commands by having them reply to a maliciously crafted message. The vulnerability has been patched in matrix-appservice-irc 0.33.2. Refrain from replying to messages from untrusted participants in IRC-bridged Matrix rooms. There are no known workarounds for this issue.

gomatrixserverlib is a Go library for matrix protocol federation. Dendrite is a Matrix homeserver written in Go, an alternative to Synapse. The power level parsing within gomatrixserverlib was failing to parse the "eventsdefault" key of the m.room.powerlevels event, defaulting the event default power level to zero in all cases. Power levels are the matrix terminology for user access level. In rooms where the "eventsdefault" power level had been changed, this could result in events either being incorrectly authorised or rejected by Dendrite servers. gomatrixserverlib contains a fix as of commit 723fd49 and Dendrite 0.9.3 has been updated accordingly. Matrix rooms where the "eventsdefault" power level has not been changed from the default of zero are not vulnerable. Users are advised to upgrade. There are no known workarounds for this issue.

matrix-appservice-irc is an open source Node.js IRC bridge for Matrix. Attackers can specify a specific string of characters, which would confuse the bridge into combining an attacker-owned channel and an existing channel, allowing them to grant themselves permissions in the channel. The vulnerability has been patched in matrix-appservice-irc 0.35.0. As a workaround operators may disable dynamic channel joining via dynamicChannels.enabled to prevent users from joining new channels, which prevents any new channels being bridged outside of what is already bridged, and what is specified in the config.

Impact

Synapse versions before 1.120.1 fail to properly validate invites received over federation. This vulnerability allows a malicious server to send a specially crafted invite that disrupts the invited user's /sync functionality.

Patches

Synapse 1.120.1 rejects such invalid invites received over federation and restores the ability to sync for affected users.

Workarounds

Server administrators can disable federation from untrusted servers.

For more information

If you have any questions or comments about this advisory, please email us at security at element.io.

Matrix JavaScript SDK is the Matrix Client-Server software development kit (SDK) for JavaScript. Prior to version 19.7.0, an attacker cooperating with a malicious homeserver could interfere with the verification flow between two users, injecting its own cross-signing user identity in place of one of the users’ identities. This would lead to the other device trusting/verifying the user identity under the control of the homeserver instead of the intended one. The vulnerability is a bug in the matrix-js-sdk, caused by checking and signing user identities and devices in two separate steps, and inadequately fixing the keys to be signed between those steps. Even though the attack is partly made possible due to the design decision of treating cross-signing user identities as Matrix devices on the server side (with their device ID set to the public part of the user identity key), no other examined implementations were vulnerable. Starting with version 19.7.0, the matrix-js-sdk has been modified to double check that the key signed is the one that was verified instead of just referencing the key by ID. An additional check has been made to report an error when one of the device ID matches a cross-signing key. As this attack requires coordination between a malicious homeserver and an attacker, those who trust their homeservers do not need a particular workaround.

Matrix Javascript SDK is the Matrix Client-Server SDK for JavaScript. Prior to version 19.7.0, an attacker cooperating with a malicious homeserver can construct messages that legitimately appear to have come from another person, without any indication such as a grey shield. Additionally, a sophisticated attacker cooperating with a malicious homeserver could employ this vulnerability to perform a targeted attack in order to send fake to-device messages appearing to originate from another user. This can allow, for example, to inject the key backup secret during a self-verification, to make a targeted device start using a malicious key backup spoofed by the homeserver. These attacks are possible due to a protocol confusion vulnerability that accepts to-device messages encrypted with Megolm instead of Olm. Starting with version 19.7.0, matrix-js-sdk has been modified to only accept Olm-encrypted to-device messages. Out of caution, several other checks have been audited or added. This attack requires coordination between a malicious home server and an attacker, so those who trust their home servers do not need a workaround.

matrix-rust-sdk is an implementation of a Matrix client-server library in Rust, and matrix-sdk-crypto is the Matrix encryption library. Prior to version 0.6, when a user requests a room key from their devices, the software correctly remembers the request. When the user receives a forwarded room key, the software accepts it without checking who the room key came from. This allows homeservers to try to insert room keys of questionable validity, potentially mounting an impersonation attack. Version 0.6 fixes this issue.

Matrix iOS SDK allows developers to build iOS apps compatible with Matrix. Prior to version 0.23.19, an attacker cooperating with a malicious homeserver can construct messages that legitimately appear to have come from another person, without any indication such as a grey shield. Additionally, a sophisticated attacker cooperating with a malicious homeserver could employ this vulnerability to perform a targeted attack in order to send fake to-device messages appearing to originate from another user. This can allow, for example, to inject the key backup secret during a self-verification, to make a targeted device start using a malicious key backup spoofed by the homeserver. These attacks are possible due to a protocol confusion vulnerability that accepts to-device messages encrypted with Megolm instead of Olm. matrix-ios-sdk version 0.23.19 has been modified to only accept Olm-encrypted to-device messages. Out of caution, several other checks have been audited or added. This attack requires coordination between a malicious home server and an attacker, so those who trust their home servers do not need a workaround. To avoid malicious backup attacks, one should not verify one's new logins using emoji/QR verifications methods until patched.

matrix-android-sdk2 is the Matrix SDK for Android. Prior to version 1.5.1, an attacker cooperating with a malicious homeserver can construct messages that legitimately appear to have come from another person, without any indication such as a grey shield. Additionally, a sophisticated attacker cooperating with a malicious homeserver could employ this vulnerability to perform a targeted attack in order to send fake to-device messages appearing to originate from another user. This can allow, for example, to inject the key backup secret during a self-verification, to make a targeted device start using a malicious key backup spoofed by the homeserver. matrix-android-sdk2 would then additionally sign such a key backup with its device key, spilling trust over to other devices trusting the matrix-android-sdk2 device. These attacks are possible due to a protocol confusion vulnerability that accepts to-device messages encrypted with Megolm instead of Olm. matrix-android-sdk2 version 1.5.1 has been modified to only accept Olm-encrypted to-device messages and to stop signing backups on a successful decryption. Out of caution, several other checks have been audited or added. This attack requires coordination between a malicious home server and an attacker, so those who trust their home servers do not need a workaround.

Impact

In certain configurations, data sent by remote servers containing special strings in key locations could cause modifications of the Object.prototype, disrupting matrix-js-sdk functionality, causing denial of service and potentially affecting program logic.

(This is part 2, where CVE-2022-36059 / GHSA-rfv9-x7hh-xc32 is part 1. Part 2 covers remaining vectors not covered by part 1, found in a codebase audit scheduled after part 1.)

Patches The issue has been patched in matrix-js-sdk 24.0.0.

Workarounds None.

References

- Release blog post - The advisory GHSA-rfv9-x7hh-xc32 (CVE-2022-36059) refers to an initial set of vulnerable locations discovered and patched in matrix-js-sdk 19.4.0. We opted not to disclose that advisory while we performed an audit of the codebase and are now disclosing it jointly with this one.

For more information If you have any questions or comments about this advisory please email us at security at matrix.org.

Impact

In Synapse before 1.120.1, multipart/form-data requests can in certain configurations transiently increase memory consumption beyond expected levels while processing the request, which can be used to amplify denial of service attacks.

Patches

Synapse 1.120.1 resolves the issue by denying requests with unsupported multipart/form-data content type.

Workarounds

Limiting request sizes or blocking the multipart/form-data content type before the requests reach Synapse, for example in a reverse proxy, alleviates the issue. Another approach that mitigates the attack is to use a low maxuploadsize in Synapse.

References

- https://github.com/twisted/twisted/issues/4688#issuecomment-1167705518 - https://github.com/twisted/twisted/issues/4688#issuecomment-2385711609

For more information

If you have any questions or comments about this advisory, please email us at security at element.io.

matrix-js-sdk is a Matrix messaging protocol Client-Server SDK for JavaScript. In versions prior to 19.4.0 events sent with special strings in key places can temporarily disrupt or impede the matrix-js-sdk from functioning properly, potentially impacting the consumer's ability to process data safely. Note that the matrix-js-sdk can appear to be operating normally but be excluding or corrupting runtime data presented to the consumer. This issue has been fixed in matrix-js-sdk 19.4.0 and users are advised to upgrade. Users unable to upgrade may mitigate this issue by redacting applicable events, waiting for the sync processor to store data, and restarting the client. Alternatively, redacting the applicable events and clearing all storage will often fix most perceived issues. In some cases, no workarounds are possible.

Impact The password reset endpoint served via Synapse was vulnerable to cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. The impact depends on the configuration of the domain that Synapse is deployed on, but may allow access to cookies and other browser data, CSRF vulnerabilities, and access to other resources served on the same domain or parent domains.

Patches This is fixed in #9200.

Workarounds Depending on the needs and configuration of the homeserver a few options are available:

1. Password resets can be disabled by delegating email to a third-party service (via the accountthreepiddelegates.email setting) or disabling email (by not configuring the email setting).

2. If the homeserver is not configured to use passwords (via the passwordconfig.enabled setting) then the affected endpoint can be blocked at a reverse proxy:

/synapse/client/passwordreset/email/submittoken

3. The passwordresetconfirmation.html template can be overridden with a custom template that manually escapes the variables using JInja2's escape filter. See the email.templatedir setting.

matrix-react-sdk is a Matrix chat protocol SDK for React Javascript. Events sent with special strings in key places can temporarily disrupt or impede the matrix-react-sdk from functioning properly, such as by causing room or event tile crashes. The remainder of the application can appear functional, though certain rooms/events will not be rendered. This issue has been fixed in matrix-react-sdk 3.53.0 and users are advised to upgrade. There are no known workarounds for this vulnerability.