XSS, Open Redirect Vulnerabilities Patched in Drupal

The latest Drupal updates patch cross-site scripting (XSS) and open redirect vulnerabilities, but they have only been assigned “moderately critical” severity ratings.

Drupal 7.70 fixes an open redirect vulnerability related to “insufficient validation of the destination query parameter in the drupal_goto() function.” An attacker can exploit the flaw to redirect users to an arbitrary URL by getting them to click on a specially crafted link, Drupal said in its advisory.

Drupal 7.70 also patches a couple of potential XSS vulnerabilities that exist in the jQuery project. jQuery developers fixed the bugs in version 3.5.0 last month and Drupal has now also updated its jQuery version to prevent exploitation, which it says is possible against some Drupal websites.

The XSS vulnerabilities also affect Drupal 8.8 and 8.7 — these versions are not impacted by the open redirect issue — and they have been addressed with the release of Drupal 8.8.6 and 8.7.14.

“This Drupal security release backports the fixes to the relevant jQuery functions, without making any other changes to the jQuery version that is included in Drupal core or running on the site via some other module such as jQuery Update. It is not necessary to update jquery_update on Drupal 7 sites that have the module installed,” Drupal said.

It added, “Backwards-compatibility code has also been added to minimize regressions to Drupal sites that might rely on jQuery’s prior behavior. With jQuery 3.5, incorrect self-closing HTML tags in JavaScript for elements where end tags are normally required will encounter a change in what jQuery returns or inserts. To minimize that disruption in 8.8.x and earlier, this security release retains jQuery’s prior behavior for most safe tags. There may still be regressions for edge cases, including invalidly self-closed custom elements on Internet Explorer.”

This was only the second round of security updates released by Drupal in 2020. In March, the company announced fixing a couple of moderately critical XSS vulnerabilities affecting the CKEditor open source WYSIWYG editor.

Last year, they released seven rounds of security updates, including in January, February, March, April, May, July and December. While Drupal is not as targeted as WordPress, hackers have been known to exploit Drupal vulnerabilities to hijack websites.

Related: Critical Drupal Vulnerability Allows Remote Code Execution

Related: Vulnerability Related to Processing of Archive Files Patched in Drupal