We recently fixed a security vulnerability that existed in the external/social links (e.g. to Twitter) of projects. Prior to this fix, it was possible for project owners to do two things: 1. create external links that ran malicious JavaScript code if they were clicked (e.g. allowing attackers to capture a user’s login session), and 2. create a link to a malicious website disguised as a “legitimate” link to a known Social website (e.g. a Twitter link that actually directed users to the spoof website “twiitteerrer.com”). Our patches fix both issues, and a follow up investigation revealed that there is no indication this vulnerability was exploited by anyone.

The security issue was discovered on 11 Dec 2018 during an internal security check. The first patch in the series (addressing the major JavaScript injection vulnerability) was deployed within 6 hours, and the final patch (addressing the relatively less harmful issue of spoof-able social links) deployed 2 days later.

The fixes for this vulnerability are contained in pull requests #5141, #5142, and #5148 of the Panoptes Front End project on GitHub. Anyone running their own hosted copy of this should pull these changes as soon as possible.

Additional notes on our investigation are as follows:

• The vulnerability was introduced on 14 May 2015, in pull request 324.
• Custom links for projects and organisations allowed project builders to cause a user’s browser to execute arbitrary javascript by entering URLs like javascript: alert('oh no'); if the user clicked on that link, the javascript would run.
• Malicious javascript executed this way could do whatever it wanted on the site, i.e. it could have stolen logged-in users’ API tokens, logged users out and captured their passwords when re-logging in.
• Theoretically, passwords may have been have been exposed if malicious Javascript captured them on login, though this would only impact users that click malicious links. Emails may have been exposed, notably if an admin user account was breached.
• However, we audited the database but could find no evidence (other than our own tests) of this having been done by project owners.
• Our current solution is to sanitise all external/social links – both when taking input from users and when rendering them on webpages – and only allowing standard website URLs to pass.

As a side effect of our fixes, project owners are now unable to add non-standard website URLs to their project’s external links – for example, https://example.com continues to work fine, but mailto:hello@example.com no longer does.

We apologise for any concern this issue may have caused.