How to prevent XXE attack

Question

We had a security audit on our code, and it mentioned that our code is vulnerable to XML EXternal Entity (XXE) attacks.

Explanation

XML External Entities attacks benefit from an XML feature to build documents dynamically at the time of processing. An XML entity allows inclusion of data dynamically from a given resource. External entities allow an XML document to include data from an external URI. Unless configured to do otherwise, external entities force the XML parser to access the resource specified by the URI, e.g., a file on the local machine or on a remote system. This behavior exposes the application to XML External Entity (XXE) attacks, which can be used to perform denial of service of the local system, gain unauthorized access to files on the local machine, scan remote machines, and perform denial of service of remote systems.

The following XML document shows an example of an XXE attack.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<!DOCTYPE foo [
<!ELEMENT foo ANY >
<!ENTITY xxe SYSTEM "file:///dev/random" >]><foo>&xxe;</foo>

This example could crash the server (on a UNIX system), if the XML parser attempts to substitute the entity with the contents of the /dev/random file.

Recommendation

The XML unmarshaller should be configured securely so that it does not allow external entities as part of an incoming XML document.

To avoid XXE injection do not use unmarshal methods that process an XML source directly as java.io.File, java.io.Reader or java.io.InputStream. Parse the document with a securely configured parser and use an unmarshal method that takes the secure parser as the XML source as shown in the following example:

DocumentBuilderFactory dbf = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
dbf.setExpandEntityReferences(false);
DocumentBuilder db = dbf.newDocumentBuilder();
Document document = db.parse(<XML Source>);
Model model = (Model) u.unmarshal(document);

The code below is where the audit found the XXE attack:

Transformer transformer = TransformerFactory.newInstance().newTransformer();
transformer.setOutputProperty(OutputKeys.INDENT, "yes");
System.out.println("outputing to : " + outputLocation);
File outputFile = new File(outputLocation);
StreamResult result = new StreamResult(outputFile);
DOMSource source = new DOMSource(doc);
transformer.transform(source, result);

How can I implement the above recommendation in my code? Where am I missing things?

Answer 1

You can use the same approach with DocumentBuilderFactory:

DocumentBuilderFactory factory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
factory.setFeature(XMLConstants.FEATURE_SECURE_PROCESSING, true);
...

To make everyone use this automatically, you need to create your own implementation (by extending the one which you're currenly using; use your debugger to find out). Set the feature in the constructor.

Then you can pass the new factory to use in the System property javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory to the Java VM and everyone will use it.