CVE-2022-24815 SQL Injection when creating an application with Reactive SQL backend

JHipster is a development platform to quickly generate, develop, & deploy modern web applications & microservice architectures. SQL Injection vulnerability in entities for applications generated with the option “reactive with Spring WebFlux” enabled and an SQL database using r2dbc. Applications created without “reactive with Spring WebFlux” and applications with NoSQL databases are not affected. Users who have generated a microservice Gateway using the affected version may be impacted as Gateways are reactive by default. Currently, SQL injection is possible in the findAllBy(Pageable pageable, Criteria criteria) method of an entity repository class generated in these applications as the where clause using Criteria for queries are not sanitized and user input is passed on as it is by the criteria. This issue has been patched in v7.8.1. Users unable to upgrade should be careful when combining criterias and conditions as the root of the issue lies in the EntityManager.java class when creating the where clause via Conditions.just(criteria.toString()). just accepts the literal string provided. Criteria’s toString method returns a plain string and this combination is vulnerable to sql injection as the string is not sanitized and will contain whatever used passed as input using any plain SQL.