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Resolving XML external entity in user-controlled data

ID: java/xxe
Kind: path-problem
Security severity: 9.1
Severity: error
Precision: high
Tags:
   - security
   - external/cwe/cwe-611
   - external/cwe/cwe-776
   - external/cwe/cwe-827
Query suites:
   - java-code-scanning.qls
   - java-security-extended.qls
   - java-security-and-quality.qls

Click to see the query in the CodeQL repository

Parsing untrusted XML files with a weakly configured XML parser may lead to an XML External Entity (XXE) attack. This type of attack uses external entity references to access arbitrary files on a system, carry out denial of service, or server side request forgery. Even when the result of parsing is not returned to the user, out-of-band data retrieval techniques may allow attackers to steal sensitive data. Denial of services can also be carried out in this situation.

There are many XML parsers for Java, and most of them are vulnerable to XXE because their default settings enable parsing of external entities. This query currently identifies vulnerable XML parsing from the following parsers: javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilder, javax.xml.stream.XMLStreamReader, org.jdom.input.SAXBuilder/org.jdom2.input.SAXBuilder, javax.xml.parsers.SAXParser,org.dom4j.io.SAXReader, org.xml.sax.XMLReader, javax.xml.transform.sax.SAXSource, javax.xml.transform.TransformerFactory, javax.xml.transform.sax.SAXTransformerFactory, javax.xml.validation.SchemaFactory, javax.xml.bind.Unmarshaller and javax.xml.xpath.XPathExpression.

Recommendation

The best way to prevent XXE attacks is to disable the parsing of any Document Type Declarations (DTDs) in untrusted data. If this is not possible you should disable the parsing of external general entities and external parameter entities. This improves security but the code will still be at risk of denial of service and server side request forgery attacks. Protection against denial of service attacks may also be implemented by setting entity expansion limits, which is done by default in recent JDK and JRE implementations. We recommend visiting OWASP’s XML Entity Prevention Cheat Sheet, finding the specific XML parser, and applying the mitigation listed there. Other mitigations might be sufficient in some cases, but manual verification will be needed, as the query will continue to flag the parser as potentially dangerous.

Example

The following example calls parse on a DocumentBuilder that is not safely configured on untrusted data, and is therefore inherently unsafe.

public void parse(Socket sock) throws Exception {
  DocumentBuilderFactory factory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
  DocumentBuilder builder = factory.newDocumentBuilder();
  builder.parse(sock.getInputStream()); //unsafe
}

In this example, the DocumentBuilder is created with DTD disabled, securing it against XXE attack.

public void disableDTDParse(Socket sock) throws Exception {
  DocumentBuilderFactory factory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
  factory.setFeature("http://apache.org/xml/features/disallow-doctype-decl", true);
  DocumentBuilder builder = factory.newDocumentBuilder();
  builder.parse(sock.getInputStream()); //safe
}

References

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