Communities and collections administrators can escalate their privilege up to system administrator

CVE-2021-41189 → View on GitHub ↗ View on CVE.org ↗ View on NVD ↗

Description

Impact

Any community or collection administrator can escalate their permission up to become system administrator.

This vulnerability only existed in 7.0 and does not impact 6.x or below.

Patches

Fix is included in 7.1. Please upgrade to 7.1 at your earliest convenience.

Workarounds

In 7.0, temporarily disable the ability for community or collection administrators to manage permissions or workflows settings, i.e. set the following properties in your local.cfg / dspace.cfg file

core.authorization.collection-admin.policies = false
core.authorization.community-admin.policies = false
core.authorization.community-admin.collection.workflows = false

Once upgraded to 7.1, these settings can be safely reverted to the default values of true.

References

Discovered during investigation of https://github.com/DSpace/DSpace/issues/7928

For more information

If you have any questions or comments about this advisory:
* Email us at [email protected]

Basic information

Type
reviewed
Severity
high
Advisory on GitHub
Open advisory ↗
Repository advisory
Open repository advisory ↗
Source code
Browse source ↗
Published (advisory)
2021-11-01 19:18:16 UTC
Updated
2023-02-01 05:06:24 UTC
GitHub reviewed
2021-10-29 17:26:35 UTC
NVD published
2021-10-29

EPSS Score

Score Percentile
0.63% 69.52%

CVSS Scores

Base score Version Severity Vector
7.2 3.1 —
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H Click to expand
Attack vector (AV:N)
Could be attacked over the internet or any normal routed network—not just someone sitting at the machine.
Attack complexity (AC:L)
Once they can reach the bug, pulling it off is straightforward—no weird race conditions or rare setup.
Privileges required (PR:H)
They need powerful rights—admin, root, or similar—before this pays off.
User interaction (UI:N)
Nobody has to click “OK” or open a trap file; it can work without a victim helping.
Scope (S:U)
Damage stays in the same “trust bubble” as the broken component—no big spill into unrelated systems.
Confidentiality (C:H)
Serious risk that confidential data gets exposed in a big way.
Integrity (I:H)
They could widely tamper with or forge data—trust in the data is badly hurt.
Availability (A:H)
Could take the service down hard or make it unusable for people who depend on it.

Identifiers

Type Value
GHSA GHSA-cf2j-vf36-c6w8 ↗
CVE CVE-2021-41189 ↗

CWEs

CWE id Name
CWE-863 Incorrect Authorization

Credits

  • abollini (analyst)

Affected packages (1)

Vulnerable version ranges and first patched releases as published by GitHub.

Ecosystem Package Vulnerable range First patched Vulnerable functions
maven org.dspace:dspace-api >= 7.0, < 7.1 7.1 —

References

cvelogic Threat Intelligence