Packagist · contao/contao
Contao: Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF) via Unvalidated RSS Feed URL in Feed Reader Module
The Feed Reader front-end module passes RSS feed URLs from its configuration directly to $this->feedIo->read($url) without any scheme validation or private-IP blocklist. A backend user with module-edit permissions can configure an arbitrary URL pointing to internal network services, cloud-provider metadata endpoints, or loopback addresses, causing the server to fetch those resources unconditionally. Confirmed live: the server successfully reaches the internal MySQL database container and its own loopback Apache instance.
In core-bundle/src/Controller/FrontendModule/FeedReaderController.php, the getResponse() function iterates over the configured feed URLs and passes each one directly to the HTTP client with no validation:
// Line 50-55
foreach (StringUtil::trimsplit('[\n\t ]', trim($model->rss_feed)) as $url) {
try {
$feed = $this->cache->get(
'feed_reader_'.$model->id.'_'.md5($url),
function (ItemInterface $item) use ($url, $model) {
$readerResult = $this->feedIo->read($url, new Feed()); // <-- no validation
The DCA field definition for rss_feed in tl_module.php carries no URL scheme or host validation:
'eval' => array('mandatory'=>true, 'decodeEntities'=>true, 'style'=>'height:60px')
The HTTP client is wired as @psr18.http_client (Symfony HttpClient) with no SSRF protection configured (NoPrivateNetworkHttpClient is not used).
This is a CWE-918 (SSRF) vulnerability. A backend user with module-edit access can:
http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/iam/security-credentials/ to obtain IAM role credentials (IMDSv1 has no authentication)Confirmed in live testing: the server successfully connected to the internal MySQL container (172.19.0.3:3306) and retrieved a full HTTP response from its own loopback interface (127.0.0.1:80).
Use NoPrivateNetworkHttpClient -- wrap the injected HTTP client with Symfony's built-in SSRF protection before passing it to feedIo:
use Symfony\Component\HttpClient\NoPrivateNetworkHttpClient;
$safeClient = new NoPrivateNetworkHttpClient($this->httpClient);
This blocks all RFC-1918, loopback, and link-local addresses at the HTTP client level.
Validate URL scheme and host -- before calling feedIo->read(), parse the URL and reject anything that is not http:// or https:// with a public routable IP or hostname.
Configure the DCA field -- add 'rgxp' => 'url' and a custom validation callback to tl_module.rss_feed to reject non-public URLs at save time.
Is your project exposed to this? Stateward checks every dependency on every pull request and flags it only if your code actually reaches it.
Check my repoSources: CISA KEV (public domain), OSV.dev & GitHub Advisory Database (CC-BY-4.0), FIRST EPSS, NVD/CWE (public domain). Served live from the Stateward advisory database.