A serious security vulnerability could have affected Wire messenger users. Reportedly a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability affected the Wire app, exploiting which could allow an adversary to takeover target users’ accounts.
Wire App XSS Vulnerability
Security researcher Kane Gamble found two security issues in Wire Messenger versions for web and iOS. Wire is a popular messaging platform offering audio, video, and text communications secured via end-to-end encryption.
Specifically, the first of the two includes a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability that allowed taking over Wire app users’ accounts. This vulnerability, CVE-2021-32683, typically affected the web app version 2021-05-10 and earlier. Exploiting this vulnerability could let an attacker take control of the victim user account. Whereas, exploiting the bug merely required an attacker to send a maliciously crafted image file.
Describing the impact of the bug in an advisory on GitHub, Wire explained,
If a user is instructed to open an image in a new tab (right click -> open in new tab, or copy the URL and paste it in the URL bar), an the [sic] image payload is executed on the domain hosting the app (app.wire.com).
Besides, the second vulnerability was a relatively less severe one but still had a troublesome impact. As elaborated in Wire’s advisory, this vulnerability (CVE-2021-32666) could cause a denial of service.
If a user has an invalid assetID for his/her profile picture and it contains the ” character it will cause the iOS client to crash.
The bug typically affected the Wire iOS app versions 3.8.0 and earlier.
Patch Deployed
Following the receipt of bug reports from the researcher, Wire officials worked out to develop patches for both the flaws.
Consequently, the developers released the Wire web app version 2021-06-01-production and Wire iOS version 3.81 with the respective patches.
While web app users don’t need to do anything to receive the patches, iOS users should ensure updating their devices with the latest app version to receive the fix.
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