We just released security updates to Jenkins, versions 2.146 and 2.138.2, that fix multiple security vulnerabilities.
For an overview of what was fixed, see the security advisory. For an overview on the possible impact of these changes on upgrading Jenkins LTS, see our LTS upgrade guide.
Further improvements
In addition to the security fixes listed in the security advisory, we also applied multiple improvements that make future security vulnerabilities more difficult, or even impossible to exploit.
One such improvement concerns cross-site scripting vulnerabilities, and comes with a risk of regressions.
Jenkins uses a fork of Jelly for the vast majority of the views it renders. Since 2011, it includes a feature that lets view authors opt in or out of automatic escaping of variable values for rendering in HTML, and since 2016, the plugin build tooling requires that views explicitly specify whether to apply this automatic escaping. Details are available in the developer documentation.
Until now, if views do not declare whether to automatically escape, they were rendered without automatic escaping, and developers were expected to explicitly escape every variable reference that was not supposed to contain markup. This has resulted in a number of cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities, most recently SECURITY-1130 in Job Config History Plugin.
For that reason, we have decided to enable this automatic escaping by default if plugins do not specify a preference. This can result in problems with some plugins if they need their output to remain unescaped. We expect that those plugins will adapt pretty quickly to this change, as the fix is typically straightforward.
In the mean time, users can set the system propertyorg.kohsuke.stapler.jelly.CustomJellyContext.escapeByDefault to false to disable this additional protection.