Drupal addresses two XSS flaws by updating the CKEditor

March 20, 2020  By Pierluigi Paganini


Drupal developers released security updates for versions 8.8.x and 8.7.x that fix two XSS vulnerabilities affecting the CKEditor library.

The Drupal development team has released security updates for versions 8.8.x and 8.7.x that address two XSS vulnerabilities that affect the CKEditor library.

CKEditor is the far superior successor of FCKeditor, it is a popular, highly configurable open-source WYSIWYG editor.

Drupal uses CKEditor, it has updated to version 4.14, which addressed two cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities.

“The Drupal project uses the third-party library CKEditor, which has released a security improvement that is needed to protect some Drupal configurations.” reads the advisory published by Drupal.

“Vulnerabilities are possible if Drupal is configured to use the WYSIWYG CKEditor for your site’s users. An attacker that can create or edit content may be able to exploit this Cross Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerability to target users with access to the WYSIWYG CKEditor, and this may include site admins with privileged access.”

Both issues have been rated as a moderately critical severity, they received a risk score of 13/25.

The latest versions of Drupal, versions 8.8.4 or 8.7.12, include CKEditor version 4.14 that fix both issues.

Drupal 8 versions prior to 8.7.x have reached end-of-life and will not receive security updates, Drupal 7 is not affected by the issue, but it is recommended the use of CKEditor version 4.14 or higher.

The risk of exploitation of the flaws could be mitigated by disabling the CKEditor module.

According to the release note published by CKEditor 4.14 the flaws are not easy to exploit.

For example, one of the XSS flaws affects the HTML data processor, it could be exploited by tricking the victims into pasting malicious HTML code into the editor, either in WYSIWYG mode or source mode.

The other issue impacts a third-party plugin named WebSpellChecker Dialog plugin that is included in the Standard and Full presets of CKEditor 4. This issue could be exploited by an attacker that tricks the victim into switching CKEditor to source mode, pasting malicious code, switching back to WYSIWYG mode, and previewing the content on a page where the WebSpellChecker Dialog plugin files are available.

[adrotate banner=”9″] [adrotate banner=”12″]

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – XSS, CKEditor)

[adrotate banner=”5″]

[adrotate banner=”13″]



Pierluigi Paganini
Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.





You might also like





  • Digging the Deep Web: Exploring the dark side of the web

    Digging The Deep Web

  • Center for Cyber Security and International Relations Studies

  • Subscribe Security Affairs Newsletter

    newsletter

  • SecurityAffairs awarded as Best European Cybersecurity Tech Blog at European Cybersecurity Blogger Awards

    EU Sec Bloggers Awards 22


More Story

Experts found a new TrickBot module (rdpScanDll) built for RDP bruteforcing operations

 A new variant of the TrickBot malware is targeting telecommunications organizations in the United States and Hong Kong. Security...