CVE-2019-16417 in Hrworks Flow
Summary
by MITRE
HRworks FLOW 3.36.9 allows XSS via the purpose of a travel-expense report.
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Analysis
by VulDB Data Team • 01/05/2024
The vulnerability identified as CVE-2019-16417 affects HRworks FLOW version 3.36.9 and represents a cross-site scripting vulnerability that specifically targets the purpose field within travel expense reports. This issue arises from inadequate input validation and output encoding mechanisms within the web application's user interface. The vulnerability exists in the way the application processes and displays user-supplied data in the travel expense report purpose field, creating an avenue for malicious actors to inject arbitrary javascript code into the application's response.
The technical flaw stems from the application's failure to properly sanitize user input before rendering it in the web page context. When users submit travel expense reports with malicious payloads in the purpose field, the application does not adequately escape or encode special characters that could be interpreted as HTML or javascript code. This vulnerability falls under the CWE-79 category of Cross-Site Scripting and specifically represents a stored XSS variant since the malicious content is persisted in the application's database and executed whenever the report is viewed. The vulnerability enables attackers to execute scripts in the context of other users' browsers, potentially leading to session hijacking, credential theft, or data exfiltration.
The operational impact of this vulnerability extends beyond simple data corruption or display issues. An attacker who successfully exploits this vulnerability could gain access to sensitive employee financial data, manipulate expense reports, or establish persistent access to the application through session manipulation. The threat actor could craft malicious purpose field entries containing javascript payloads that would execute when other users view the expense reports, potentially stealing cookies, redirecting users to malicious sites, or performing unauthorized actions within the application. This vulnerability particularly affects organizations using HRworks FLOW for expense management, where the purpose field often contains sensitive business information that could be leveraged for further attacks.
Mitigation strategies for CVE-2019-16417 should focus on implementing robust input validation and output encoding mechanisms throughout the application's data processing pipeline. The primary remediation involves ensuring that all user-supplied input in the purpose field is properly sanitized and encoded before being stored or displayed in the web interface. Organizations should implement context-specific encoding for different output contexts such as HTML, javascript, and URL contexts. Additionally, the application should employ Content Security Policy headers to limit the execution of inline scripts and prevent unauthorized code injection. The vulnerability demonstrates the critical importance of defense-in-depth approaches to web application security, where multiple layers of protection including input validation, output encoding, and runtime protections should be implemented. Security teams should also consider implementing web application firewalls and regular security scanning to identify similar vulnerabilities across the application's codebase, as this issue represents a common pattern of insufficient input sanitization that can occur in many enterprise web applications.