Vulnerability · Published Sep 19, 2023 · Assigned by GitHub_M

CVE-2023-42452Mastodon vulnerable to Stored XSS through the translation feature

Medium 6.1

In plain English

A medium-severity cross-site scripting in mastodon from mastodon. There are no confirmed reports of exploitation so far. The chance it is exploited in the next 30 days is estimated at 0.4% (higher than 38% of all known vulnerabilities).

Severity (CVSS 3.1)6.1Medium
Exploit odds (30 days)0.4%top 61.7% of all CVEs
Exploited in the wildNo reportsCISA SSVC: none
Attack toolingNoneno public tooling known

Official description

Mastodon is a free, open-source social network server based on ActivityPub. In versions on the 4.x branch prior to versions 4.0.10, 4.2.8, and 4.2.0-rc2, under certain conditions, attackers can abuse the translation feature to bypass the server-side HTML sanitization, allowing unescaped HTML to execute in the browser. The impact is limited thanks to Mastodon's strict Content Security Policy, blocking inline scripts, etc. However a CSP bypass or loophole could be exploited to execute malicious XSS. Furthermore, it requires user interaction, as this can only occur upon clicking the “Translate” button on a malicious post. Versions 4.0.10, 4.2.8, and 4.2.0-rc2 contain a patch for this issue.

Affected products (as reported)

VendorProductVersions
mastodon mastodon >= 4.0.0, < 4.0.10>= 4.1.0, < 4.1.8>= 4.2.0-beta1, < 4.2.0-rc2

Weakness: CWE-79 · Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:C/C:L/I:L/A:N

References