CVE-2023-25810 in Uptime Kuma
Summary
by MITRE • 02/21/2023
Uptime Kuma is a self-hosted monitoring tool. In versions prior to 1.20.0 the Uptime Kuma status page allows a persistent XSS attack. Users are advised to upgrade. There are no known workarounds for this vulnerability.
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Analysis
by VulDB Data Team • 03/23/2023
The vulnerability identified as CVE-2023-25810 affects Uptime Kuma, a popular self-hosted monitoring solution designed to track the availability and performance of web services and applications. This monitoring tool serves as a critical component for system administrators and DevOps teams who rely on its status page to visualize the health of their infrastructure. The vulnerability exists in versions prior to 1.20.0 and represents a significant security weakness that could compromise the integrity of the monitoring environment. The affected status page functionality provides attackers with an opportunity to inject malicious scripts that persist across user sessions, making this a particularly dangerous flaw in a tool that is frequently accessed by multiple users within an organization.
The technical flaw manifests as a persistent cross-site scripting vulnerability within the Uptime Kuma status page implementation. This type of vulnerability occurs when the application fails to properly sanitize user input before rendering it in the web interface, allowing attackers to inject malicious JavaScript code that executes in the context of other users' browsers. The persistence aspect of this vulnerability means that once malicious code is injected, it will continue to execute for all subsequent users who access the affected status page without requiring additional user interaction. The vulnerability stems from inadequate input validation and output encoding mechanisms within the application's rendering pipeline, which fails to properly escape special characters and script tags in user-provided content.
The operational impact of this vulnerability extends beyond simple data theft or defacement, as it creates a persistent backdoor within the monitoring infrastructure. An attacker who successfully exploits this vulnerability can execute arbitrary JavaScript code in the browsers of other users, potentially leading to session hijacking, credential theft, or the redirection of users to malicious sites. Given that Uptime Kuma is typically deployed in environments where it serves as a central monitoring dashboard, the compromise of this interface could provide attackers with insights into the monitored systems and potentially enable further attacks against the underlying infrastructure. The vulnerability also affects the trust model of the monitoring solution, as users may unknowingly interact with malicious content while viewing system status information.
Organizations using affected versions of Uptime Kuma should immediately implement the recommended upgrade to version 1.20.0 or later to remediate this vulnerability. The lack of known workarounds means that administrators cannot implement temporary fixes while waiting for the official patch release. Security teams should also conduct thorough audits of their monitoring environments to identify any potential compromise from this vulnerability, particularly focusing on any unusual activity or unauthorized access attempts that may have occurred during the window when the vulnerability was active. The vulnerability aligns with CWE-79, which describes cross-site scripting flaws, and represents a clear violation of the principle of least privilege and secure input handling. From an ATT&CK framework perspective, this vulnerability maps to techniques involving client-side exploitation and persistence mechanisms, potentially enabling adversaries to maintain access to the monitoring infrastructure while remaining undetected.