Site save doesn't sanitize description for XML entities

[gschneider-r7]

Line 263 in site.rb will sanitize site name, but not description:

xml = %(<Site id='#{id}' name='#{replace_entities(name)}' description='#{description}' riskfactor='#{risk_factor}'>)

This results in an error when trying to save a site that has any of the following in the description: & ' " < >

To reproduce:

Using the web UI in Nexpose:

1. Create a site with any title
2. Set the description to contain any of & ' " < >

Then, using a Ruby script with the gem:
3. Load the site
4. Save the site

[gschneider-r7]

Using description='#{replace_entities(description)}' did resolve the issue in my tests.

[limhoff-r7]

Why is #to_xml building XML with Strings anyway?! Use Builder or Nokogiri::XML::Builder more robust that will handle the escaping for you.

[gschneider-r7]

Looks like this can also happen with Credentials and Alerts.

[asalazar-r7]

Yeah, looks like this code will benefit from being switched over to the XML objects instead of creating xml with strings.

[mdaines-r7]

I'm pushing a quick fix for now. The string building is all over the place, so it will take some effort to clean up. As for Nokogiri, we don't want to introduce that dependency. But there is only one reason that I can think of for not switching to using the REXML libraries to do the same thing: If any code was depending upon the #to_xml calls to return a String, it will break if we switch over. That would require some more extensive testing internally just to make sure we don't break ourselves, let alone clients. A happy medium here might be to use the XML class, then to_s ourselves at the end?

[limhoff-r7]

If you want to support calling the XML objects in a nested manner you could use #as_xml to return REXML objects and #to_xml to return String. That would be similar to how #as_json being a Hash/Array and to_json being a String in Rails.

[mdaines-r7]

Nice, I like that. That's something easy enough to add in over time.