Openfire is an XMPP server licensed under the Open Source Apache License. Openfire's administrative console, a web-based application, was found to be vulnerable to a path traversal attack via the setup environment. This permitted an unauthenticated user to use the unauthenticated Openfire Setup Environment in an already configured Openfire environment to access restricted pages in the Openfire Admin Console reserved for administrative users. This vulnerability affects all versions of Openfire that have been released since April 2015, starting with version 3.10.0. The problem has been patched in Openfire release 4.7.5 and 4.6.8, and further improvements will be included in the yet-to-be released first version on the 4.8 branch (which is expected to be version 4.8.0). Users are advised to upgrade. If an Openfire upgrade isn’t available for a specific release, or isn’t quickly actionable, users may see the linked github advisory (GHSA-gw42-f939-fhvm) for mitigation advice.

Affected: Maven: org.igniterealtime.openfire:xmppserver

An important security issue affects a range of versions of Openfire, the cross-platform real-time collaboration server based on the XMPP protocol that is created by the Ignite Realtime community.

### Impact Openfire's administrative console (the Admin Console), a web-based application, was found to be vulnerable to a path traversal attack via the setup environment. This permitted an unauthenticated user to use the unauthenticated Openfire Setup Environment in an already configured Openfire environment to access restricted pages in the Openfire Admin Console reserved for administrative users.

### Cause Path traversal protections were already in place to protect against exactly this kind of attack, but didn’t defend against certain non-standard URL encoding for UTF-16 characters, that were not supported by the embedded webserver that was in use at the time.

A later upgrade of the embedded webserver included support for non-standard URL encoding of UTF-16 characters. The path traversal protections in place in Openfire were not updated to include protection against this new encoding.

Openfire's API defines a mechanism for certain URLs to be excluded from web authentication (this, for example, is used for the login page). This mechanism allows for wildcards to be used, to allow for flexible URL pattern matching.

The combination of the wildcard pattern matching and path traversal vulnerability allows a malicious user to bypass authentication requirements for Admin Console p…