PT-2013-72: XML External Entities Resolution vulnerability in Microsoft Office Excel
Vulnerable software
Microsoft Office Excel
Version: 2010 SP2 and earlier; 2007 SP3 and earlier; 2003 SP3 and earlier
Microsoft Excel Viewer
Version: 2007 SP3 and earlier
Link:
http://microsoft.com/
Severity level
Severity level: Medium
Impact: Internal Network Resources and File System Access, Denial of Service
Access Vector: Remote
CVSS v2:
Base Score: 5.8
Vector: (AV:N/AC:M/Au:N/C:P/I:N/A:P)
CVE: CVE-2013-3159
Software description
Microsoft Office Excel is a commercial spreadsheet application written and distributed by Microsoft for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X.
Vulnerability description
The specialists of the Positive Research center have detected an XML External Entities Resolution vulnerability in Microsoft Office Excel.
The vulnerability is possible due to unsafe parsing of XML external entities. If an attacker makes a victim open a specially crafted XML document, Microsoft Office Excel installed on the vistim's system will automatically send the contents of local or remote resource to the attacker's server. It also makes possible to conduct denial of service attacks.
How to fix
Use vendor's advisory:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/ms13-073
Advisory status
26.11.2012 - Vendor gets vulnerability details
10.09.2013 - Vendor releases fixed version and details
09.10.2013 - Public disclosure
Credits
The vulnerability was detected by Timur Yunusov, Alexey Osipov and Ilya Karpov, Positive Research Center (Positive Technologies Company)
References
http://en.securitylab.ru/lab/PT-2013-72
Reports on the vulnerabilities previously discovered by Positive Research:
http://www.ptsecurity.com/research/advisory/
http://en.securitylab.ru/lab/