CRS versions 4.8.0 and 3.3.7 released

[Andrew Howe]

The OWASP CRS team is pleased to announce the release of two new CRS
versions: v4.8.0 and v3.3.7.

For downloads and installation instructions, please refer to the
Installation page:
https://coreruleset.org/docs/deployment/install/

These are security releases which fix a recently discovered partial
request body bypass of CRS. On some platforms running CRS v3.3.6 and
earlier on the v3 release line or v4.7.0 and earlier on the v4 release
line, it is possible to submit a specially crafted multipart or JSON
request whose body content will bypass the inspection of the majority
of CRS rules on a default installation. CRS users are strongly
encouraged to update to a fixed version to resolve this issue.

-- Bypass details --

This bypass was possible due to the fact that the default list of
allowed request content types in CRS (both v3 and v4) included the
content type multipart/related, which cannot be processed by current
free & open-source WAF engine implementations, and the content types
application/cloudevents+json and application/cloudevents-batch+json,
which are not processed by default. This created a situation where a
request with body content would be allowed by CRS but the request body
could not, or would not, be processed by the engine. Many CRS rules
thus lost the ability to perform meaningful inspection of such
requests, in the absence of processed and parsed request body content.
In particular, the ARGS collection (and related collections) was not
populated by the engine: many CRS rules rely on inspecting the
contents of this important collection.

The newly released fixed versions remove the offending content types
from the default list of allowed request content types. New advice is
also provided on how to handle additional JSON content types beyond
the standard application/json content type.

Users making use of additional JSON content types, for example
application/cloudevents+json, should follow the new advice and ensure
that an appropriate rule is in place to enable JSON request body
processing for these content types. Most affected users can uncomment
and use optional rule 200006 in the file
"modsecurity.conf-recommended" to achieve this.

Note that the official CRS Docker container images[1], by default,
already correctly handle extended JSON types and are therefore not
affected by the JSON part of this problem.

-- For users unable to update --

Any users unable to update to a fixed version of CRS are strongly
encouraged to implement the fix steps themselves by removing the
content types multipart/related, application/cloudevents+json, and
application/cloudevents-batch+json from the variable
tx.allowed_request_content_type as set in the files crs-setup.conf and
REQUEST-901-INITIALIZATION.conf. The advice on JSON processing should
also be followed.

-- Other release changes --

Aside from the security fix, the v4.8.0 release also includes a few
other minor changes and improvements as part of the normal release
cycle for CRS v4. The full changes included in v4.8.0 can be found on
the GitHub release page[2].

Please feel free to contact us with any questions or concerns about
this release via the usual channels: directly via the CRS GitHub
repository, in our Slack channel (#coreruleset on owasp.slack.com), or
via the mailing list.

Sincerely,
Andrew Howe on behalf of the CRS development team

---
[1]: https://github.com/coreruleset/modsecurity-crs-docker
[2]: https://github.com/coreruleset/coreruleset/releases/tag/v4.8.0