Inclusion of Untrusted polyfill.io Code Vulnerability in fides.js

Vulnerability Description

Fides is an open-source privacy engineering platform. `fides.js`, a client-side script used to interact with the consent management features of Fides, used the `polyfill.io` domain in a very limited edge case, when it detected a legacy browser such as IE11 that did not support the fetch standard. Therefore it was possible for users of legacy, pre-2017 browsers who navigate to a page serving `fides.js` to download and execute malicious scripts from the `polyfill.io` domain when the domain was compromised and serving malware. No exploitation of `fides.js` via `polyfill.io` has been identified as of time of publication. The vulnerability has been patched in Fides version `2.39.1`. Users are advised to upgrade to this version or later to secure their systems against this threat. On Thursday, June 27, 2024, Cloudflare and Namecheap intervened at a domain level to ensure `polyfill.io` and its subdomains could not resolve to the compromised service, rendering this vulnerability unexploitable. Prior to the domain level intervention, there were no server-side workarounds and the confidentiality, integrity, and availability impacts of this vulnerability were high. Clients could ensure they were not affected by using a modern browser that supported the fetch standard.

References

• https://github.com/ethyca/fides/security/advisories/GHSA-cvw4-c69g-7v7m
• https://github.com/ethyca/fides/pull/5026
• https://github.com/ethyca/fides/commit/868c4d629760572192bd61db34f5a4458ed12005
• https://fetch.spec.whatwg.org
• https://sansec.io/research/polyfill-supply-chain-attack