Spring Routing Abuse
Theory
Routing misconfigurations in the Spring Framework can pose significant security risks, potentially leading to protected URL bypass, path traversal, or information leaks.
Practice
Exposing routes
Exposing the relevant interfaces and parameter information of a Spring application is not a vulnerability, but it can help to understand an application. Moreover, it can be used while checking for access control vulnerabilities, etc.
Check the following routes to see if an application provides path and parameter information:
Spring Framework versions prior to 5.3 have a setting called useSuffixPatternMatch. It enable suffix pattern matching and it's set to true by default.
When enabled, methods mapped to /restrictedURL would also match /restrictedURL[.].*. So this configuration has a potential to bypass URL filters and allow access to restricted areas.
Path traversal
Spring Boot > 2.2.6 treats https://website.com/allowed/..;/internal same as https://website.com/allowed/../internal.
This can lead to inconsistency between Spring and middleware. For instance, if an application is deployed behind nginx, you can bypass restrictions on allowed paths. Assume nginx forward all request to /allowed/ to an application and deny other requests. In this case, a request to /allowed/../internal will be blocked, however, /allowed/..;/internal is not - nginx will pass it as is to an application and it will hit /internal.
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