Dear Customers,
In the last 24 hours, a new security risk was reported that affects remote wipe in Nextcloud 17 and 18. This vulnerability allows an attacker to execute remote wipe on devices from other users. No data is deleted or leaked. This does not affect Nextcloud releases before 17 which do not contain the Remote Wipe feature.
We provide 2 patches that fix this issue. Minor releases will be made available early next week as well. Read on for details to help you decide if patching or an unscheduled update is needed.
Details
To exploit the vulnerability, a malicious user needs to have an account on your Nextcloud server. This can be a guest account (but not a user with just a public link).
The malicious user can then craft a special request which remote-wipes the devices of all users on the server by iterating over them. This is user id independent, that is, the malicious user can not target any specific user but merely wipe randomly or all devices from all users on the server one by one.
Note: no data is lost or leaked, users will only have to re-create their user account and re-download all their data. As this can cause lost time and effort as well as heavy server load, this is essentially a service-degrading attack.
On larger instances, monitoring would show a malicious user who would be doing this, because they would need to send a large number of requests to the server which results in a lot of 404 and 400 responses. We would recommend temporarily disabling an accounts showing such activity.
Download the patches here.
Early next week (currently scheduled for Monday) a security update for Nextcloud 17 and 18 will be made available. Depending on your risk assessment or if patching is not feasible, you can plan maintenance to install these updates when they become available.
If you need any help, please reach out to our support team! You can use our portal or just reply to this email.
Thanks for your attention,
Your Nextcloud Security team