Impact

Users settings their active admin form legends dynamically may be vulnerable to stored XSS, as long as its value can be injected directly by a malicious user.

For example:

• A public web application allows users to create entities with arbitrary names.
• Active Admin is used to administrate these entities through a private backend.
• The form to edit these entities in the private backend has the following shape (note the dynamic name value dependent on an attribute of the resource):

  form do |f|
    f.inputs name: resource.name do
      f.input :name
      f.input :description
    end

    f.actions
  end

Then a malicious user could create an entity with a payload that would get executed in the active admin administrator's browser.

Both form blocks with an implicit or explicit name (i.e., both form resource.name or form name: resource.name would suffer from the problem), where the value of the name can be arbitrarily set by non admin users.

Patches

The problem has been fixed in ActiveAdmin 3.2.2 and ActiveAdmin 4.0.0.beta7.

Workarounds

Users can workaround this problem without upgrading by explicitly escaping the form name using an HTML escaping utility. For example:

  form do |f|
    f.inputs name: ERB::Util.html_escape(resource.name) do
      f.input :name
      f.input :description
    end

    f.actions
  end

Upgrading is of course recommended though.

References

https://owasp.org/www-community/attacks/xss/#stored-xss-attacks

csv_builder.rb in ActiveAdmin (aka Active Admin) before 3.2.0 allows CSV injection.

Impact

In ActiveAdmin versions prior to 2.12.0, a concurrency issue was found that could allow a malicious actor to be able to access potentially private data that belongs to another user.

The bug affects the functionality to export data as CSV files, and was caused by a variable holding the collection to be exported being shared across threads and not properly synchronized.

The attacker would need access to the same ActiveAdmin application as the victim, and could exploit the issue by timing their request immediately before when they know someone else will request a CSV (e.g. via phishing) or request CSVs frequently and hope someone else makes a concurrent request.

Patches

Versions 2.12.0 and above fixed the problem by completely removing the shared state.