Beware of the Magic SpEL(L) – Part 2 (CVE-2018-1260)

On Tuesday, we released the details of RCE vulnerability affecting Spring Data (CVE-2018-1273). We are now repeating the same exercise for a similar RCE vulnerability in Spring Security OAuth2 (CVE-2018-1260). We are going to present the attack vector, its discovery method and the conditions required for exploitation. This vulnerability also has similarities with another vulnerability disclosed in 2016. The resemblance will be discussed in the section where we review the fix.

Beware of the Magic SpEL(L) - Part 1 (CVE-2018-1273)

This February, we ran a Find Security Bugs scan on over at least one hundred components from the Spring Framework, including the core components (spring-core, spring-mvc) but also optional components (spring-data, spring-social, spring-oauth, etc.). From this exercise, we reported some vulnerabilities. In this blog post, we are going to give more details on a SpEL injection vulnerability. While some proof of concept code and exploitation details have already surfaced on Twitter, we will add a focus on how these vulnerabilities were found, followed by a thorough review of the proposed fix.