The Patching Friars' AlmanacA calendar of CVE saints

February 4

XMPP SmugglingHoly card for xmpp-stanza-smuggling, generated with AI (Claude, Anthropic) for the Lunario dei Frati Patchatori.CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 <message> <iq/> XMPP Smuggling STANZA IN STANZA
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⚔ Commemorated today: The Great Bangladesh Bank Heist (2016)

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Saint XMPP, Smuggler of Stanzas

Patron of XML parsers that disagree, video calls, and messages with a false bottom.

Life

In February 2022 Ivan Fratric of Google Project Zero told Zoom that its client and server read the same XML in different ways. By slipping chosen characters into a chat message, a whole XMPP stanza could escape the message, and the victim's client took it as an order from the server: up to redirecting it to a malicious server and making it install an old version. Zoom fixed it all in 5.10.0; the details went public on 24 May 2022.

Prayer

O Saint XMPP, who hides one message inside another, let client and server speak the same XML. Amen.

How to celebrate

Celebrated by updating Zoom past 5.10.0 and making sure two different parsers never read the same document.

Two parsers, two truths: and the attacker picks his own.

Technical record

Disclosed on
February 4 2022
CVE
CVE-2022-22784CVE-2022-25235CVE-2022-25236CVE-2022-22785CVE-2022-22786CVE-2022-22787
CVSS
9.8
Product
Zoom Video Communications Inc · Zoom Client for Meetings for Android

The Zoom Client for Meetings (for Android, iOS, Linux, MacOS, and Windows) before version 5.10.0 failed to properly parse XML stanzas in XMPP messages. This can allow a malicious user to break out of the current XMPP message context and create a new message context to have the receiving users client perform a variety of actions.This issue could be used in a more sophisticated attack to forge XMPP messages from the server.

Sources: project-zero.issues.chromium.org · wiz.io

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