HP Fixes Vulnerabilities in ArcSight Products
Posted on March 18, 2015 by Kara Dunlap in Security
HP has released software updates to address several vulnerabilities affecting ArcSight Enterprise Security Manager (ESM) and ArcSight Logger, products that are part of the company’s enterprise security portfolio.
An advisory published by the CERT Coordination Center at Carnegie Mellon University on Tuesday shows that a total of five security holes have been uncovered by Poland-based security researcher Julian Horoszkiewicz in the two HP ArcSight products.
One of the vulnerabilities affecting ArcSight Logger can be exploited by a remote, authenticated attacker to upload arbitrary files to the affected system. A malicious actor might be able to execute scripts on the server with the application’s privileges. Uploading arbitrary files is possible because the product’s configuration import feature does not sanitize file names, CERT said.
Another Logger issue can be exploited by an authenticated attacker to modify sources and parsers. The weakness exists because all users are allowed to access certain configuration features, such as input, search, and content management.
Horoszkiewicz has also found that the XML parser in Logger’s content import section is vulnerable to XML External Entity Injection attacks. A malicious actor could leverage the bug to execute arbitrary scripts on the server.
The HP ArcSight vulnerabilities identified by the researcher are a cross-site scripting (XSS) flaw that could allow an attacker to disrupt or modify rules and resources on the system, and a cross-site request forgery (CSRF) that can be exploited to modify data on the system. Since these types of vulnerabilities are exploited by tricking the victim into clicking on a maliciously crafted link, the extent of the damage that an attacker can cause depends on the privileges of the targeted user.
HP says the vulnerabilities impact ArcSight ESM prior to version 6.8c, and ArcSight Logger prior to version 6.0P1.
CERT’s advisory shows that CVE identifiers are pending for each of the flaws. However, HP’s own advisory reveals that an identifier, CVE-2014-7885, has been assigned to multiple vulnerabilities in HP ArcSight ESM, and a second identifier, CVE-2014-7884, has been assigned to multiple flaws in HP ArcSight Logger.
Horoszkiewicz has uploaded a proof-of-concept for the ArcSight Logger file upload vulnerability to Offensive Security’s Exploit Database. The researcher said he had sent a vulnerability report to HP in late August 2014, and new versions containing the fix were released on January 21, 2015.
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XSS, XFS, Open Redirect Vulnerabilities Found on About.com
Posted on February 3, 2015 by Kara Dunlap in Security
About.com, the online resource website visited by tens of millions of users each month, is plagued by several types of potentially dangerous vulnerabilities, a researcher revealed on Monday.
According to Wang Jing, a PhD student at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, a large majority of the pages on About.com are vulnerable to cross-site scripting (XSS) and cross-frame scripting (XFS/iFrame injection) attacks.
The expert tested close to 95,000 About.com links with a script he developed and determined that at least 99.88% of them are vulnerable. The search field on the website’s homepage is also plagued by an XSS flaw which, according to Jing, means that all the domains related to about.com are vulnerable to XSS attacks.
In order to exploit XSS vulnerabilities, an attacker needs to convince the victim to click on a specially crafted link. XSS attacks can be used to alter the appearance of a website, access potentially sensitive information, and spy on users.
XFS attacks can be used to steal data from websites accessed by the victim. For the attack to work, a malicious actor must get the user to access a Web page he controls. Such vulnerabilities can also be exploited for distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, the expert noted.
Jing has also identified open redirect bugs on several About.com pages. The vulnerabilities can be leveraged to trick users into visiting phishing and other malicious websites by presenting them with a link that apparently points to an about.com page.
“The vulnerabilities can be attacked without user login. Tests were performed on Microsoft IE (10.0.9200.16750) of Windows 8, Mozilla Firefox (34.0) & Google Chromium 39.0.2171.65-0 ubuntu0.14.04.1.1064 (64-bit) of Ubuntu (14.04)，Apple Safari 6.1.6 of Mac OS X Lion 10.7,” the researcher said in a blog post.
About.com was notified of the existence of the vulnerabilities back in October 2014, but so far the company hasn’t done anything to address them, the researcher said. About.com hasn’t responded to SecurityWeek’s requests for comment.
Poof-of-concept (PoC) videos for the XSS vulnerability on the About.com homepage and the open redirect flaw have been published by the researcher.
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Numerous Vulnerabilities Found in Zenoss Core Management Platform
Posted on December 8, 2014 by Kara Dunlap in Security
Researchers have uncovered a total of 20 security holes in Zenoss Core, the free, open-source version of the application, server, and network management platform Zenoss.
According to an advisory published on Friday by the CERT Coordination Center at Carnegie Mellon University (CERT/CC), the vulnerabilities were identified and reported by Ryan Koppenhaver and Andy Schmitz of Matasano Security.
One of the most serious flaws is CVE-2014-6261, which can be exploited by a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code.
“An attacker who is able to get a victim to visit an attacker-controlled website while logged in to the Zenoss interface can execute arbitrary code on the Zenoss installation. Additionally, an attacker who is able to perform a man-in-the-middle attack between the Zenoss installation and Zenoss’ corporate ‘callhome’ server – or control the ‘callhome’ server – can execute arbitrary code on the Zenoss installation,” reads Zenoss’ description of the vulnerability.
Another serious vulnerability (CVE-2014-9246) is caused by the fact that sessions don’t expire. In order to exploit the bug, an attacker needs to obtain a targeted user’s session ID and copy it to his own computer. When the victim logs in, the attacker will be logged in as that user.
Researchers have also identified cross-site request forgery (CSRF), persistent cross-site scripting (XSS), information disclosure, open redirect, authorization bypass, and denial-of-service (DoS) vulnerabilities. In addition, the experts discovered multiple issues related to passwords, including the lack of password complexity requirements, a weak hashing algorithm, and the storing of passwords in plaintext in the session database.
These vulnerabilities have been assigned the following CVE identifiers: CVE-2014-6253, CVE-2014-6254, CVE-2014-9245, CVE-2014-6255, CVE-2014-6256, CVE-2014-9247, CVE-2014-9248, CVE-2014-6257, CVE-2014-9249, CVE-2014-6258, CVE-2014-6260, CVE-2014-9251, CVE-2014-6259, CVE-2014-6262 and CVE-2014-9252.
The vulnerabilities affect Zenoss Core 4.2.4. Two of the flaws, the session expiration bug and an open redirect in the login form (CVE-2014-6255 and CVE-2014-9246), have been addressed by Zenoss with the release of the latest Zenoss Core 4.2.5 service pack, CERT/CC said. The company is internally tracking the other bugs and plans of fixing them in a future maintenance release of Zenoss Core 5, which is currently in beta.
Zenoss does not plan on addressing CVE-2014-9250, which can be exploited by an attacker to obtain a user’s username and password by retrieving the authentication cookie. The company advises customers who want to use cookie-based authentication to ensure their installations operate over SSL/HTTPS.
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PHP 5 Updates Fix Several Security Vulnerabilities
Posted on October 20, 2014 by Kara Dunlap in Security
PHP released last week versions 5.6.2, 5.5.18 and 5.4.34 of the scripting language. In addition to some functionality bugs, the latest releases address a series of security-related flaws.
According to the PHP development team, a total of four vulnerabilities have been fixed in PHP 5.6 and PHP 5.5, and six flaws in PHP 5.4.
One of the security bugs, CVE-2014-3669, is a high-severity integer overflow vulnerability in PHP’s “unserialize()” function. When the function is used on untrusted data, the flaw could lead to a crash or information disclosure. It’s unclear at this point if arbitrary code execution is also possible, says an advisory for this bug published on the Red Hat Bugzilla website. The issue only affects 32-bit systems.
Another vulnerability fixed by PHP has been assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2014-3668. The medium-severity security hole, which is caused by an out-of-bounds read flaw in the “mkgmtime()” function, could lead to a crash of the PHP interpreter.
CVE-2014-3669 and CVE-2014-3668 were reported to PHP in September by a researcher from Geneva, Switzerland-based IT security firm High-Tech Bridge.
Otto Ebeling, a software engineer at Facebook, reported a bug that causes heap corruption when parsing the thumbnail of a specially crafted .jpg image. This heap corruption affecting the “exif_thumbnail()” function has been assigned CVE-2014-3670.
“PHP provides APIs such as exif_thumbnail that can be used to extract embedded thumbnails from various image formats. In the process of extracting a TIFF-formatted EXIF thumbnail from a JPEG image, PHP re-encodes most IFD tags present in the thumbnail directory and prepends them to the thumbnail image in order to produce a standalone TIFF file,” Ebeling wrote in his report. “Individual values are re-encoded using the exif_ifd_make_value function. If this function is asked to write out an array of floating point values (single or double precision), it erroneously uses the size of the whole array when copying individual elements using memmove, leading to heap corruption.”
“To exploit a target application that uses this API (or exif_read_data with suitable parameters), a malicious user can trigger this condition by supplying a tag that contains an array of floating-point values, and futher tags that indicate the presence of a TIFF thumbnail. The image itself need not be valid as long as the exif_ifd_make_value gets invoked,” the expert explained.
According to Ebeling, the affected code is also included in the open-source virtual machine HHVM.
PHP 5.4, 5.5 and 5.6 users are advised to update their installations as soon as possible. Additional information on the fixes is available in the changelogs.
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BlackBerry 10 Haunted by Adobe Flash Vulnerabilities
Posted on January 14, 2014 by Kara Dunlap in Security
BlackBerry today warned that its newest smartphones and tablets are at risk of remote code execution attacks via vulnerabilities in Adobe Flash Player.
According to a BlackBerry advisory, a malicious hacker could booby-trap Adobe Flash content and lure users into visiting rigged Web pages or downloading Adobe Air applications.
“If the requirements are met for exploitation, an attacker could potentially execute code with the rights of the application that opens the specially crafted malicious Flash content,” BlackBerry warned.
From the BlackBerry advisory:
Vulnerabilities exist in the Flash Player version supplied with affected versions of the BlackBerry 10 OS and PlayBook OS. The Flash Player is a cross-platform, browser-based application runtime.
Successful exploitation of these vulnerabilities could potentially result in an attacker executing code in the context of the application that opens the specially crafted Flash content (typically the web browser). Failed exploitation of this issue might result in abnormal or unexpected termination of the application.
In order to exploit these vulnerabilities, an attacker must craft Flash content in a stand-alone Flash (.swf) application or embed Flash content in a website. The attacker must then persuade the user to access the Flash content by clicking a link to the content in an email message or on a webpage, or loading it as part of an AIR application. The email message could be received at a webmail account that the user accesses in a browser on BlackBerry Z10 and BlackBerry Q10 smartphones and BlackBerry tablets.
Affected products include the BlackBerry Z10 and BlackBerry Q10 smartphones and the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet.
The company said it was not aware of any active exploitation of the Flash Player vulnerabilities.
Separately, Adobe shipped a cross-platform Flash Player update to fix at least four vulnerabilities that expose users to hacker attacks. Adobe said the vulnerabilities could be exploited to cause a crash and potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system.
Ryan is the host of the podcast series “Security Conversations – a podcast with Ryan Naraine“. He is the head of Kaspersky Lab’s Global Research & Analysis team in the USA and has extensive experience in computer security user education, specializing in operating system and third-party application vulnerabilities, zero-day attacks, social engineering and social networking threats. Prior to joining Kaspersky Lab, he monitored security and hacker attack trends for over 10 years, writing for eWEEK magazine and the ZDNet Zero Day blog. Follow Ryan on Twitter @ryanaraine.
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