Updates released on Wednesday for Drupal 7 and 8 patch several vulnerabilities, including issues rated “critical.” No bug fixes are included in the latest releases.
One of the critical security holes patched by Drupal 8.4.5 and 7.57 is related to incomplete cross-site scripting (XSS) prevention mechanisms.
“Drupal has a Drupal.checkPlain() JavaScript function which is used to escape potentially dangerous text before outputting it to HTML. This function does not correctly handle all methods of injecting malicious HTML, leading to a cross-site scripting vulnerability under certain circumstances,” Drupal said in its advisory.
Another critical flaw, which only affects Drupal 8, allows users who have permission to post comments to view content and comments they should not be able to access. The weakness can also be exploited to add comments to the supposedly restricted content.
While these issues are rated “critical,” it’s worth pointing out that Drupal developers use NIST’s Common Misuse Scoring System to determine the risk level, which means that “critical” is second on the severity scale, after “highly critical.”
The latest Drupal 7 update also patches two moderately critical vulnerabilities. One of them, which developers claim only occurs if a site’s configuration is unusual, is an access bypass issue that can allow users to view or download files on the private file system without Drupal checking if they have access to it.
The second moderately critical flaw in Drupal 7 is a jQuery XSS issue when making Ajax requests to untrusted domains. Drupal 8 is not affected as jQuery was updated to a newer version with the release of Drupal 8.4.0.
Two moderately critical security bugs have also been fixed in Drupal 8, including an access bypass vulnerability related to language fallback on multilingual sites, and an access bypass flaw in the Settings Tray module that could allow users to update certain data without having the necessary permissions.
Finally, Drupal 7 patches a “less critical” external link injection vulnerability that can allow an attacker to trick users into navigating to a malicious site.
Drupal developers informed users that version 8.4.5 is the last release of the 8.4.x series. Users will have to update to Drupal 8.5.0, expected to become available on March 7, to receive bug and security fixes.
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