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Java, PHP, NodeJS, and Ruby Tools Compromised By Severe Swagger Vulnerability (threatpost.com)
"Researchers have discovered a vulnerability within the Swagger specification which may place tools based on NodeJS, PHP, Ruby, and Java at risk of exploit," warns ZDNet's blog Zero Day, adding "the severe flaw allows attackers to remotely execute code." Slashdot reader msm1267 writes:
A serious parameter injection vulnerability exists in the Swagger Code Generator that could allow an attacker to embed executable code in a Swagger JSON file. The flaw affects NodeJS, Ruby, PHP, Java and likely other programming languages. Researchers at Rapid7 who found the flaw disclosed details...as well as a Metasploit module and a proposed patch for the specification. The matter was privately disclosed in April, but Rapid7 said it never heard a response from Swagger's maintainers.
Swagger produces and consumes RESTful web services APIs; Swagger docs can be consumed to automatically generate client-server code. As of January 1, the Swagger specification was donated to the Open API Initiative and became the foundation for the OpenAPI Specification. The vulnerability lies in the Swagger Code Generator, and specifically in that parsers for Swagger documents (written in JSON) don't properly sanitize input. Therefore, an attacker can abuse a developer's trust in Swagger to include executable code that will run once it's in the development environment.
Swagger produces and consumes RESTful web services APIs; Swagger docs can be consumed to automatically generate client-server code. As of January 1, the Swagger specification was donated to the Open API Initiative and became the foundation for the OpenAPI Specification. The vulnerability lies in the Swagger Code Generator, and specifically in that parsers for Swagger documents (written in JSON) don't properly sanitize input. Therefore, an attacker can abuse a developer's trust in Swagger to include executable code that will run once it's in the development environment.
Well I must misunderstand REST then!
Very likely. It's not about "APIs"; never has been. The web was original designed to be a vastly distributed document publishing system, where everyone could read and everyone could write. The first "web browser" was actually a WYSIWYG editor, kinda like Word except that instead of opening and saving documents on your local drive it opened and saved them across the internet. HTTP was the transport mechanism for that, and crucially it made no statements on what those documents were or how they were encoded; all it did was carry them between web server and web client. HTML was simply conceived as a new document format designed to be particularly well suited to the web, as established document formats back then were rather lacking in hyperlinking support; but there was nothing in the conception, design, or implementation of the web that said HTML was anything special or by any means the only document format that could be used.
So all the groundwork was done and all the pieces correctly in place to build a world-wide web as it was intended to be.
But TBL was lazy and impatient, and rather than making the time and effort port his entire "web browser" application from NeXT to Windows &co he just ported the read part only, because that was the simplest bit. Of course, back then there weren't any other apps (e.g. Word) that knew how to open and save documents across the web, so everyone who saw this read-only web browser in action naturally assumed that that was how the web was intended to work. Nobody piped up to say that actually, the other 80%'s still lying on a workbench in Cern waiting for Timmy to finish his tea, and Version 2.0 will be out Real Soon Now so wait for that before going too far, because if you think that 20%'s great then the full 100% will blow you away!
And then of course the likes of Netscape and Microsoft took this initial idea and codified and standardized and productized and turned it into a whole new "vision" of the web, a horribly crippled, gelded web where everyone could still read from it, but nobody could write directly to it; and the only people who could write to it at all were the tiny tech priesthood who knew how to manually transcode documents to HTML format, then stick them manually onto a web server by arcane backdoor FTP.
...
From that point forward, our entire World-Wide Web was officially Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition, with a constantly diminishing chance of ever being put right again before it could get worse. And then, of course, because nobody outside of TBL's original circle even realized - or was ever told - that the web was specifically designed to let you shift any kind of information from A to B (even automatically transcoding it if B told A it would prefer it in a specific format), it was only a matter of time till Ingeniously Clever And Inventive People like Dave Winer rolled in and decided what the web really needed now was a brilliant New Feature that would allow it to transmit data other than HTML - and hence gave birth to XML-RPC and SOAP and ultimately the ad-hoc RPC-over-HTTP-with-XML/JSON-encoded-parameters that is what today's so-called "REST APIs" are actually doing.
So now we have this utterly bizarre situation where ever web app has this schizophrenic split personality, where HTML-based information exchange is treated as this one huge special case over here, under /..., while information exchange conducted in any other format is conducted way over there, in /api/v2.1/..., each with a totally different data graph and verbs (or pseudo-verbs) for interacting with those graphs. And yet it's all the same bloody information! Refactoring 101 Fail, or What? There should just be one graph, one set of verbs (solely for getting and setting), and the only thing that ever changes is the MIME types that are attached to requests and responses (as Accept