CVE-2019-11581: Critical Template Injection Vulnerability in Atlassian Jira Server and Data Center

Vulnerability introduced nearly eight years ago could lead to remote code execution on vulnerable Jira Server and Data Center systems.

Background

On July 10, Atlassian published Security Advisory 2019-07-10 to address a critical vulnerability in Jira Server and Jira Data Center. Jira Server manages and controls Atlassian’s Jira ticketing system, while Jira Data Center allows administrators to manage business-wide management and scalability of Jira Servers.

Analisi

CVE-2019-11581 is a server-side template injection vulnerability in “various resources” of Jira Server and Data Center. According to the advisory, the vulnerability was introduced in version 4.4.0, which was released in August 2011, making this vulnerability nearly eight years old.

The template injection vulnerability exists within the ContactAdministrators and SendBulkMail actions in Jira Server and Data Center. However, in order to exploit the vulnerability, an SMTP server needs to be configured, and either the Contact Administrators Form needs to be enabled (unauthenticated attack), or the attacker has “JIRA Administrators” access (authenticated attack). Exploitation of this vulnerability would grant an attacker the ability to remotely execute code on the vulnerable Jira system.

Proof of concept

At the time of publishing, there was no proof of concept (PoC) available. However, similar to what transpired following the Atlassian advisory for the Confluence Widget Connector vulnerabilities (CVE-2019-3395, CVE-2019-3396) in March 2019, we anticipate that PoCs will emerge in the near future.

Solution

As noted in the Analysis section, CVE-2019-11581 was introduced in Jira Server and Data Center version 4.4.0. The patched versions that address this vulnerability include 8.0.3, 8.1.2, 8.2.3 and Enterprise releases 7.6.14 and 7.13.5. The following table lists the vulnerable versions and associated fixed versions.

Atlassian also advises that customers who have installed Jira Service Desk version 3.0.0 before 4.2.3 may also be affected by this vulnerability. They have provided a compatibility matrix to help identify whether or not the Jira Service Desk version is affected.

Atlassian also notes that Jira Cloud customers are not affected by this vulnerability.

If upgrading to a patched version of Jira Server or Data Center is not currently feasible, Atlassian recommends the following temporary workarounds:

• First, disable the Contact Administrators Form
• Second, block access to the /secure/admin/SendBulkMail!default.jspa endpoint

Identifying affected systems

A list of Tenable plugins to identify this vulnerability will appear here as they’re released.

Additionally, Atlassian has provided a support document to help identify if an attacker has compromised a Jira instance using CVE-2019-11851.

Get more information

• JIRA Security Advisory 2019-07-10

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