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Cross-site Scripting occurrences in Cloudforms Management Engine
A stored cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability was found in the PDF export component of CloudForms, versions 5.9 and 5.10, due to user input is not properly sanitized. An attacker with least privilege to edit compute is able to execute a XSS attack against other users, which could lead to malicious code execution and extraction of the anti-CSRF token of higher privileged users. (2019-06-27, CVE-2019-10177)
Why Cross-site Scripting can be dangerous
Cross site scripting is an attack where a web page executes code that is injected by an adversary. It usually appears, when users input is presented. This attack can be used to impersonate a user, take over control of the session, or even steal API keys.
The attack can be executed e.g. when you application injects the request parameter directly into the HTML code of the page returned to the user:
https://server.com/confirmation?message=Transaction+Complete
what results in:
<span>Confirmation: Transaction Complete</span>
In that case the message can be modified to become a valid Javascript code, e.g.:
https://server.com/confirmation?message=<script>dangerous javascript code here</script>
and it will be executed locally by the user's browser with full access to the user's personal application/browser data:
<span>Confirmation: <script>dangerous javascript code here</script></span>