It was discovered [1] that the Castor library's unmarshalling class is susceptible to XML External Entity (XXE) attacks. If the XML that is being passed to the unmarshalling function is controllable by an end user, there is the potential that they could retrieve local resources, download malicious code from other servers, and/or open arbitrary TCP connections. [1]: http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2014/May/142
Created castor tracking bugs for this issue: Affects: fedora-all [bug 1108691]
Statement: This issue affects the version of castor as shipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and 6. The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this issue as having Moderate security impact. A future update may address this issue. For additional information, refer to the Issue Severity Classification: https://access.redhat.com/security/updates/classification/. Red Hat JBoss SOA Platform 4 is now in Phase 3, Extended Life Support, of its life cycle. This issue has been rated as having Moderate security impact and is not currently planned to be addressed in future updates. For additional information, refer to the Red Hat JBoss Middleware and Red Hat JBoss Operations Network Product Update and Support Policy: https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/jboss_notes/ Fuse ESB Enterprise 7 is now in Maintenance Support phase receiving only qualified Important and Critical impact security fixes. This issue has been rated as having Moderate security impact and is not currently planned to be addressed in future updates. For additional information, refer to the Fuse Product Life Cycle: https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/fusesource/
Upstream Issue: None Upstream Commits: https://fisheye.codehaus.org/changelog/castor?cs=9197
Victims Record: https://github.com/victims/victims-cve-db/blob/master/database/java/2014/3004.yaml
Mitigation: "A configuration file in the Java library directory (e.g. /jdk1.2/lib) can be used to override the default configuration file with system-wide properties. In addition, a configuration file can be placed in the classpath and will override both the system wide properties and Castor-default configuration." [1] Adding the following content in any of the above mentioned configuration files will act as a viable mitigation against this flaw. > org.exolab.castor.sax.features=\ > http://apache.org/xml/features/disallow-doctype-decl > > org.exolab.castor.sax.features-to-disable=\ > http://xml.org/sax/features/external-general-entities,\ > http://xml.org/sax/features/external-parameter-entities,\ > http://apache.org/xml/features/nonvalidating/load-external-dtd Note that using this configuration after upgrading to a version of Castor containing a fix for this issue might override any future hardening or changes to default behavior. [1] http://castor.codehaus.org/conf-lib.html
castor-1.3.3-1.fc21 has been pushed to the Fedora 21 stable repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.
castor-1.3.3-1.fc20 has been pushed to the Fedora 20 stable repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.