CVE-2013-1871

Vulnerability

A cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability exists in the account/EditAddress.do page of Spacewalk and Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite 5.6. The type parameter is not properly sanitized before being reflected in the response, allowing an attacker to inject arbitrary web script or HTML [1][4]. Versions of Spacewalk and RHN Satellite 5.6 are affected; the SUSE Spacewalk stack update also includes a fix for this issue [2].

Exploitation

An attacker can exploit this flaw by crafting a malicious URL containing the type parameter with injected script payload, e.g., GET /rhn/account/EditAddress.do?type=M83ab7c47ea873a9d. When a victim (such as an authenticated user) visits this URL, the script executes in the context of the victim's browser, because the input is reflected unescaped in the response HTML [4]. No authentication is required for the attacker to send the link; user interaction is needed for the victim to click or load the crafted URL.

Impact

Successful exploitation leads to arbitrary JavaScript execution in the victim's browser within the Spacewalk/Satellite session context. This can result in session hijacking, theft of sensitive session cookies, defacement of the page, or other client-side attacks [1][2][4]. The attacker gains no direct server access but can compromise the victim's authenticated session.

Mitigation

Red Hat released RHSA-2014:0148 on 2014-02-14, which fixed this vulnerability in Red Hat Network Satellite 5.6 [1]. SUSE published SUSE-SU-2014:0222-1 on 2014-02-20, updating the Spacewalk stack to address CVE-2013-1871 and other issues [2]. Users should apply the respective updates, which modify the EditAddress.do page to sanitize the type parameter. If patching is not immediately possible, careful input validation or web application firewall rules could mitigate the risk, but the vendor-update is the recommended solution. No known exploitation in the wild was reported at the time of disclosure.