A potentially serious cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability affecting the TinyMCE rich text editor can be exploited — depending on the implementation — for privilege escalation, obtaining information, or account takeover.
Developed by Tiny Technologies, TinyMCE is advertised as the most advanced WYSIWYG HTML editor designed to simplify website content creation. According to Tiny, the editor has been downloaded 350 million times per year and it’s included in more than 100 million websites. TinyMCE is available for free as open source, but Tiny also provides paid plans that include premium plugins, support and deployment services.
Researchers at Bishop Fox discovered in April that TinyMCE is affected by an XSS vulnerability whose impact depends on the application using the editor. The issue, tracked as CVE-2020-12648, impacts version 5.2.1 and earlier, and it was patched in July with the release of versions 4.9.11 and 5.4.1.
Successful exploitation can allow an attacker to escalate privileges, obtain information, and even hijack the targeted user’s account.
“Depending on the site in which tinyMCE is used, an attacker could exploit this as either stored or reflected (using a crafted link) XSS. I have seen both cases,” George Seketee, senior security consultant at Bishop Fox and one of the people credited for finding the flaw, told SecurityWeek.
He explained, “The exact details of exploitation vary with implementation, but generally an attacker needs to get tinyMCE to interpret the crafted string. This could be on initial page load, or by using some other portion of the site's functionality. At a low level, if tinyMCE's setContent() or insertContent() functions were called with a crafted payload, the XSS would trigger. TinyMCE indicated that the vulnerability was in their ‘core parser’, which may indicate there ..
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