News

Lukasz Pilorz has found 3 security issues in kses, the HTML filter we're using in Geeklog. We have examined these issues and to the best of our knowledge, 2 of the 3 issues are not exploitable in the Geeklog context, due to additional filtering done by Geeklog. The third issue is exploitable, though, but won't affect standard installs.

The exploitable issue affects the HTML style attribute. In a standard install of Geeklog, the style attribute is not allowed, i.e. filtered out when someone attempts to use it. This has always been our recommendation, as it could be used for defacements. Lukasz has demonstrated that it could also be used for XSS. Since kses is no longer maintained, there is no patch for this issue. We therefore want to repeat our recommendation: Do not allow the style attribute for normal users and be very careful when allowing it for Admin users.

For the other two issues, Lukasz has provided a patch for kses that we've rolled into Geeklog 1.5.0, just in case. For earlier releases, you can download a drop-in replacement for kses. Again, to the best of our knowledge, the issues (which include arbitrary code execution) do not seem to be exploitable in the Geeklog context.

Since kses is no longer maintained, we will be looking into replacing it with some other HTML filter in future Geeklog releases.

There will be a short (we hope) downtime for maintenance on both Monday 16th and Tuesday 17th at 11am EDT (15:00 UTC). This will affect both this site as well as the project site (including the bugtracker and CVS).

The wiki and the demo site will not be affected from these downtimes, but the demo site will have a separate outage on Wednesday 18th, from 1am to 6am EDT.

The second release candidate for Geeklog 1.5.0 is now available for download. We expect this to be the last release candidate before the final release, so if you haven't had a chance, now would be a good time to try out the new features in 1.5.0 and help us track down any remaining bugs.

The changes over rc1: The bundled plugins will no longer read the old config.php files, setting the site's default language and theme in the Configuration now works, and inconsistencies in the layout of the admin screens have been fixed. There were also quite a few changes for internationalisation, which also required a few more theme changes.