What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2024-22417: Whoogle Search Cross-site Scripting vulnerability

• Severity: medium (CVSS 6.1 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.6% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: yes
• Published: 2024-01-23 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-79

Description

Whoogle Search is a self-hosted metasearch engine. In versions 0.8.3 and prior, the `element` method in `app/routes.py` does not validate the user-controlled `src_type` and `element_url` variables and passes them to the `send` method which sends a `GET` request on lines 339-343 in `requests.py`. The returned contents of the URL are then passed to and reflected back to the user in the `send_file` function on line 484, together with the user-controlled `src_type`, which allows the attacker to control the HTTP response content type leading to a cross-site scripting vulnerability. An attacker could craft a special URL to point to a malicious website and send the link to a victim. The fact that the link would contain a trusted domain (e.g. from one of public Whoogle instances) could be used to trick the user into clicking the link. The malicious website could, for example, be a copy of a real website, meant to steal a person’s credentials to the website, or trick that person in another way. Version 0.8.4 contains a patch for this issue.

Affected products

• benbusby whoogle-search: before 0.8.4 — fixed in 0.8.4

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: benbusby whoogle-search 0.8.4. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search/blob/92e8ede24e9277a5440d403f75877209f1269884/app/request.py#L339-L343
• https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search/blob/92e8ede24e9277a5440d403f75877209f1269884/app/routes.py#L465-L490
• https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search/blob/92e8ede24e9277a5440d403f75877209f1269884/app/routes.py#L466
• https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search/blob/92e8ede24e9277a5440d403f75877209f1269884/app/routes.py#L476
• https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search/blob/92e8ede24e9277a5440d403f75877209f1269884/app/routes.py#L479
• https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search/blob/92e8ede24e9277a5440d403f75877209f1269884/app/routes.py#L484C6-L484C7
• https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search/commit/3a2e0b262e4a076a20416b45e6b6f23fd265aeda
• https://securitylab.github.com/advisories/GHSL-2023-186_GHSL-2023-189_benbusby_whoogle-search/
• https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search/blob/92e8ede24e9277a5440d403f75877209f1269884/app/request.py#L339-L343
• https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search/blob/92e8ede24e9277a5440d403f75877209f1269884/app/routes.py#L465-L490
• https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search/blob/92e8ede24e9277a5440d403f75877209f1269884/app/routes.py#L466
• https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search/blob/92e8ede24e9277a5440d403f75877209f1269884/app/routes.py#L476

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