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Cross-site Scripting occurrences in Discourse-chat

discourse-chat is a plugin for the Discourse message board which adds chat functionality. In versions prior to 0.9 some places render a chat channel's name and description in an unsafe way, allowing staff members to cause an cross site scripting (XSS) attack by inserting unsafe HTML into them. Version 0.9 has addressed this issue. Users are advised to upgrade. There are no known workarounds for this issue. (2022-10-06, CVE-2022-39279)

Discourse-Chat is an asynchronous messaging plugin for the Discourse open-source discussion platform. Users of Discourse Chat can be affected by admin users inserting HTML into chat titles and descriptions, causing a Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) attack. Version 0.9 contains a patch for this issue. (2022-09-06, CVE-2022-36057)

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>

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