UPDATE: The latest RC version of Lemmy-ui (0.18.2-rc.2) contains fixes for the issue, but if you believe you were vulnerable, you should still rotate your JWT secret after upgrading! Read below for instructions. Removing custom emoji is no longer necessary after upgrading.

Original post follows:


This post is intended as a central place that admins can reference regarding the XSS incident from this morning.

What happened?

A couple of the bigger Lemmy instances had several user accounts compromised through stolen authentication cookies. Some of these cookies belonged to admins, these admin cookies were used to deface instances. Only users that opened pages with malicious content during the incident were vulnerable. The malicious content was possible due to a bug with rendering custom emojis.

Stolen cookies gave attackers access to all private messages and e-mail addresses of affected users.

Am I vulnerable?

If your instance has ANY custom emojis, you are vulnerable. Note that it appears only local custom emojis are affected, so federated content with custom emojis from other instances should be safe.

I had custom emojis on my instance, what should I do?

This should be enough to mitigate now:

  1. Remove custom emoji
DELETE FROM custom_emoji_keyword;
DELETE FROM custom_emoji;
  1. Rotate your JWT secret (invalidates all current login sessions)
-- back up your secret first, just in case
SELECT * FROM secret;
-- generate a new secret
UPDATE secret SET jwt_secret = gen_random_uuid();
  1. Restart Lemmy server

If you need help with any of this, you can reach out to me on Matrix (@sunaurus:matrix.org) or on Discord (@sunaurus)

Legal

If your instance was affected, you may have some legal obligations. Please check this comment for more info: https://lemmy.world/comment/1064402

More context:

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1895

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/pull/1897

  • fututio_enjoyer@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Stolen cookies gave attackers access to all private messages

    Aren’t “private messages” not really private on lemmy anyway?

    • sunaurus@lemm.eeOP
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      1 year ago

      Under normal circumstances, they are only visible to:

      • sender (and whoever has DB access on the sender’s instance)
      • recipient (and whoever has DB access on the recipient’s instance)
      • in case a private message is reported, all admins of the reporter’s instance

      It is still considered a breach of user data if such messages are leaked.