CyberRota Analysis
AI-GeneratedEclipse Ditto versions 1.3.0 and 3.9.6 are vulnerable due to improper handling of JSON strings in the ImplicitThingCreationMessageMapper, allowing attackers to inject malicious JSON structures through controllable message headers. This vulnerability can lead to unauthorized access control policy assignments for newly created digital twins, potentially granting attackers full read/write access and revoking legitimate users' permissions. Organizations using these versions with the affected mapper should prioritize remediation, especially if they allow policy creation by authorized subjects.
Public Exploit Signal
A public exploit, PoC, GitHub repository or Metasploit reference was detected for this CVE.
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Original NVD Description
In Eclipse Ditto versions [1.3.0, 3.9.6], the ImplicitThingCreationMessageMapper of the connectivity service builds a CreateThing command by substituting placeholder values (e.g. {{ header:device_id }}) resolved from inbound message headers into a pre-configured JSON "thing" template as raw, un-escaped strings, and then parses the resulting string as JSON. Because the placeholder engine performs no JSON escaping and is unaware of the surrounding JSON string context, a resolved value containing a double-quote character can break out of its string and inject additional JSON structure. When a connection is configured to use this mapper with a template that reflects a header whose value a publishing device can control (for example an MQTT 5 user property, an AMQP 1.0 application property, or a Kafka record header), an attacker able to publish on that connection can inject an inline _policy object. The inline policy overrides the administrator-configured policyId, letting the attacker assign an arbitrary access-control policy to the newly created digital twin — gaining full read/write access to it and potentially revoking the legitimate owner's access, with no administrator interaction. Exploitation requires all of the following: the connection uses the (non-default) ImplicitThingCreation mapper; its template reflects an attacker-controllable header; and, for the policy-override impact, the connection's authorization subjects are permitted to create policies (the default). Deployments that restrict the connection's subjects to thing creation only via the entity-creation configuration are not affected by the policy-override impact.