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Communities and collections administrators can escalate their privilege up to system administrator

High severity GitHub Reviewed Published Oct 29, 2021 in DSpace/DSpace • Updated Feb 1, 2023

Package

maven org.dspace:dspace-api (Maven)

Affected versions

>= 7.0, < 7.1

Patched versions

7.1

Description

Impact

Any community or collection administrator can escalate their permission up to become system administrator.

This vulnerability only existed in 7.0 and does not impact 6.x or below.

Patches

Fix is included in 7.1. Please upgrade to 7.1 at your earliest convenience.

Workarounds

In 7.0, temporarily disable the ability for community or collection administrators to manage permissions or workflows settings, i.e. set the following properties in your local.cfg / dspace.cfg file

core.authorization.collection-admin.policies = false
core.authorization.community-admin.policies = false
core.authorization.community-admin.collection.workflows = false

Once upgraded to 7.1, these settings can be safely reverted to the default values of true.

References

Discovered during investigation of DSpace/DSpace#7928

For more information

If you have any questions or comments about this advisory:

References

@tdonohue tdonohue published to DSpace/DSpace Oct 29, 2021
Reviewed Oct 29, 2021
Published by the National Vulnerability Database Oct 29, 2021
Published to the GitHub Advisory Database Nov 1, 2021
Last updated Feb 1, 2023

Severity

High

CVSS overall score

This score calculates overall vulnerability severity from 0 to 10 and is based on the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS).
/ 10

CVSS v3 base metrics

Attack vector
Network
Attack complexity
Low
Privileges required
High
User interaction
None
Scope
Unchanged
Confidentiality
High
Integrity
High
Availability
High

CVSS v3 base metrics

Attack vector: More severe the more the remote (logically and physically) an attacker can be in order to exploit the vulnerability.
Attack complexity: More severe for the least complex attacks.
Privileges required: More severe if no privileges are required.
User interaction: More severe when no user interaction is required.
Scope: More severe when a scope change occurs, e.g. one vulnerable component impacts resources in components beyond its security scope.
Confidentiality: More severe when loss of data confidentiality is highest, measuring the level of data access available to an unauthorized user.
Integrity: More severe when loss of data integrity is the highest, measuring the consequence of data modification possible by an unauthorized user.
Availability: More severe when the loss of impacted component availability is highest.
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

EPSS score

0.365%
(73rd percentile)

Weaknesses

CVE ID

CVE-2021-41189

GHSA ID

GHSA-cf2j-vf36-c6w8

Source code

Credits

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