CVE-2025-53837

Impact

Any user who can edit their own user profile or any other document can execute arbitrary script macros including Groovy and Python macros that allow remote code execution including unrestricted read and write access to all wiki contents. The reason is that rendering output is included as content of HTML macros without further escaping and it is thus possible to close the HTML macro and inject script macros that are executed with programming rights.

This can be demonstrated by adding an object of type XWiki.UIExtensionClass to a document with content {{html wiki="true"}}~{~{~/~h~t~m~l~}~}~ ~{~{~c~a~c~h~e~}~}~{~{~g~r~o~o~v~y~}~}~p~r~i~n~t~l~n~(~1~)~{~{~/~g~r~o~o~v~y~}~}~{~{~/~c~a~c~h~e~}~}{{/html}}, extension point id org.xwiki.platform.html.head, extension id org.xwiki.myuser.test and extension scope "current user". When opening <xwiki-server>/xwiki/bin/view/Main/?sheet=CKEditor.ContentSheet&xpage=plain where <xwiki-server> is the URL of the XWiki installation, the output should start with {{/html}} {{cache}}{{groovy}}println(1){{/groovy}}{{/cache}} and not with  1</p>.

This escaping was always missing at least in XWiki syntax version 2, it is definitely exploitable in XWiki 3.3 Milestone 1 via the user profile (not through extension points), though this has also been fixed by a separate patch, see the advisory. Exploitable extension points include org.xwiki.platform.search.ui.docdoesnotexist which has been added in XWiki 8.3 Milestone 1.

Patches

This has been patched in XWiki 14.10.2 and 15.0 RC1 by making sure that rendering output cannot close the surrounding HTML macro.

Workarounds

It is in principle possible to add escaping to all places where rendering output is used in wiki documents but at the moment there is no list of them.

For more information

If you have any questions or comments about this advisory:

• Open an issue in Jira XWiki.org
• Email us at Security Mailing List