What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2023-37912: XWiki Rendering's footnote macro vulnerable to privilege escalation via the footnote macro

• Severity: high (CVSS 8.8 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 1.5% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: yes
• Published: 2023-10-25 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-270

Description

XWiki Rendering is a generic Rendering system that converts textual input in a given syntax into another syntax. Prior to version 14.10.6 of `org.xwiki.platform:xwiki-core-rendering-macro-footnotes` and `org.xwiki.platform:xwiki-rendering-macro-footnotes` and prior to version 15.1-rc-1 of `org.xwiki.platform:xwiki-rendering-macro-footnotes`, the footnote macro executed its content in a potentially different context than the one in which it was defined. In particular in combination with the include macro, this allows privilege escalation from a simple user account in XWiki to programming rights and thus remote code execution, impacting the confidentiality, integrity and availability of the whole XWiki installation. This vulnerability has been patched in XWiki 14.10.6 and 15.1-rc-1. There is no workaround apart from upgrading to a fixed version of the footnote macro.

Affected products

• xwiki-rendering: before 14.10.6; 15.0-rc1 — fixed in 14.10.6

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: xwiki-rendering 14.10.6. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://github.com/xwiki/xwiki-rendering/commit/5f558b8fac8b716d19999225f38cb8ed0814116e
• https://github.com/xwiki/xwiki-rendering/security/advisories/GHSA-35j5-m29r-xfq5
• https://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XRENDERING-688
• https://github.com/xwiki/xwiki-rendering/commit/5f558b8fac8b716d19999225f38cb8ed0814116e
• https://github.com/xwiki/xwiki-rendering/security/advisories/GHSA-35j5-m29r-xfq5
• https://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XRENDERING-688

Get alerted when CVE-2023-37912 or the next vulnerability affects your stack