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GHSA-m8xx-3x29-84h8
Impact
It’s a “moderate” vulnerability… but being an admin panel, take this seriously. It’s difficult… but an attacker could conduct a targeted phishing campaign, in order to trick your users or admins to click a malicious link, which under very specific circumstances could give them information... or even admin access. It’s unlikely, but that’s not good enough in admin panels - It should be made impossible. That’s why you are bothered with this.
Patches
If you don’t have custom error views, the views provided by Backpack would output the exception message without escaping it, which made an attack possible using Reflected XSS, in some very specific circumstances (that we will not disclose). To fix those error views in Backpack 4.x and 5.x, please run:
composer update backpack/crud
php artisan backpack:fix
The problem has been patched in:
- v4.0.63
- v4.1.69
- v5.0.13
IMPORTANT! Running a
composer updateshould get you the patched version, but you also need to runphp artisan backpack:fixafterwards, to patch your published error views, if necessary.
Workarounds
Alternatively (if you don’t want to run composer update), you can manually look inside your error views in “resources/views/errors” and output e($exception->getMessage()) instead of $exception->getMessage(). That’s all there is to the fix, really.
What the maintainers have done about this
Acted as soon as our team found it (last week of March 2022):
- Pushed patches to 5.x, 4.1 and 4.0;
- Made it easy to apply the fix to existing projects, using a new
php artisan backpack:fixcommand; - Kept the specific circumstances a secret; as far as they know, only the maintainer's team knows about the niche case where this exploit is possible;
- Emailed all our licensed users, to have a chance to fix their projects before it’s public;
- Sent an email blast to our 25.000+ strong Security Newsletter;
- Made this public with a blog post and soon a CVE, after our community has had a reasonable chance to fix their projects;
- Will continue to monitor this and remind paying users to apply this fix if they haven’t;
For more information
If you have any questions or comments about this advisory:
- Open an issue in backpack/crud
- Email us at hello@backpackforlaravel.com
PS. You can read this blog post for more information.
The vulnerability can be exploited over the network without needing physical access. It is easy for an attacker to exploit this vulnerability. An attacker does not need any special privileges or access rights.
Limited exploitation activity has been observed. Close monitoring and planned remediation are recommended.
Probability that this vulnerability will be exploited in the wild within the next 30 days.
We did not find any exploit available. Neither in GitHub repositories nor in the Exploit-Database.
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