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Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation ('Cross-site Scripting')

CVE-2023-22491

Severity Medium
Score 5.4/10

Summary

Gatsby is a free and open source framework based on React that helps developers build websites and apps. The gatsby-transformer-remark plugin versions prior to 5.25.1, and 6.0.x prior to 6.3.2 passes input through to the "gray-matter" npm package, which is vulnerable to JavaScript injection in its default configuration, unless input is sanitized. The vulnerability is present in gatsby-transformer-remark when passing input in data mode (querying MarkdownRemark nodes via GraphQL). Injected JavaScript executes in the context of the build server. To exploit this vulnerability untrusted/unsanitized input would need to be sourced by or added into a file processed by gatsby-transformer-remark. This mitigates the issue by disabling the "gray-matter" JavaScript Frontmatter engine. As a workaround, if an older version of "gatsby-transformer-remark" must be used, input passed into the plugin should be sanitized ahead of processing. It is encouraged for projects to upgrade to the latest major release branch for all Gatsby plugins to ensure the latest security updates and bug fixes are received in a timely manner.

  • LOW
  • NETWORK
  • LOW
  • CHANGED
  • REQUIRED
  • LOW
  • LOW
  • NONE

CWE-79 - Cross Site Scripting

Cross-Site Scripting, commonly referred to as XSS, is the most dominant class of vulnerabilities. It allows an attacker to inject malicious code into a pregnable web application and victimize its users. The exploitation of such a weakness can cause severe issues such as account takeover, and sensitive data exfiltration. Because of the prevalence of XSS vulnerabilities and their high rate of exploitation, it has remained in the OWASP top 10 vulnerabilities for years.

Advisory Timeline

  • Published