Summary It has been identified that OpenVAS Manager is vulnerable to command injection due to insufficient validation of user supplied data when processing OMP requests. It has been identified that this vulnerability allows privilege escalation within the OpenVAS Manager but more complex injection may allow arbitrary code to be executed with the privileges of the OpenVAS Manager on vulnerable systems. CVE-2011-0018 has been assigned to this vulnerability. The vulnerable code path is only accessible to authenticated users of OpenVAS Manager however it may also be triggered either directly or by using a cross- site request forgery based attack via the Greenbone Security Assistant web application. Current Status As of the 20th January 2011, the state of the vulnerabilities is believed to be as follows. A patch has been supplied by Greenbone Networks which it successfully resolves this vulnerability. New releases of both 1.0.x and 2.0.x have also been created which incorporate this patch. Note that the cross-site address forgery elements of this vulnerability have not yet been addressed in the Greenbone Security Assistant web application. Thanks OpenVAS would like to thank Ronald Kingma and Alexander van Eee of ISSX for their help in reporting the vulnerability. -- Tim Brown <mailto:timb (at) openvas (dot) org [email concealed]> <http://www.openvas.org/> OpenVAS Security Advisory (OVSA20110118) Date: 18th January 2011 Product: OpenVAS Manager <= 1.0.3 and 2.0rc2 Vendor: OpenVAS <http://www.openvas.org/> Risk: Medium Summary It has been identified that OpenVAS Manager is vulnerable to command injection due to insufficient validation of user supplied data when processing OMP requests. It has been identified that this vulnerability allows privilege escalation within the OpenVAS Manager but more complex injection may allow arbitrary code to be executed with the privileges of the OpenVAS Manager on vulnerable systems. CVE-2011-0018 has been assigned to this vulnerability. The vulnerable code path is only accessible to authenticated users of OpenVAS Manager however it may also be triggered either directly or by using a cross-site request forgery based attack via the Greenbone Security Assistant web application. Current Status As of the 20th January 2011, the state of the vulnerabilities is believed to be as follows. A patch has been supplied by Greenbone Networks which it successfully resolves this vulnerability. New releases of both 1.0.x and 2.0.x have also been created which incorporate this patch. Note that the cross-site address forgery elements of this vulnerability have not yet been addressed in the Greenbone Security Assistant web application. Technical Details It has been identified that OpenVAS Manager is vulnerable to command injection due to insufficient validation of user supplied data when processing OMP requests. It has been identified that this vulnerability allows an authenticated user of the Greenbone Security Assistant web application (which communicates with OpenVAS Manager using OMP) to escalate their privileges with just a few clicks although more complex attacks may also be possible. Escalation of privileges can be achieved accessing the Greenbone Security Assistant, creating an escalator with a modified POST request as follows: Content-Disposition: form-data; name="method_data:to_address" none@none>/var/lib/openvas/users/alexander/isadmin The processing of this request causes GSA to make a request to OpenVAS Manager which causes the command below to be executed with the privileges of the OpenVAS Manager (typically root) using the email() function from manage_sql.c: command = g_strdup_printf ("echo \"" "To: %s\n" "From: %s\n" "Subject: %s\n" "\n" "%s\"" " | /usr/sbin/sendmail %s" " > /dev/null 2>&1", to_address, from_address ? from_address : "automated (at) openvas (dot) org [email concealed]", subject, body, to_address); ... if (ret = system (command)... As you can see, an attacker can influence both the to and from addresses within the concatenated string. The OpenVAS Manager uses the presence of the file isadmin to determine the privileges associated with the account. The vulnerable code path is only accessible to authenticated users of OpenVAS Manager however it may also be triggered either directly or by using a cross-site request forgery based attack via the Greenbone Security Assistant web application. Fix OpenVAS recommends that the publicly available patches are applied. If building from source, then either patch r9974 (trunk) or r9976 (1.0.x) should be obtained from the OpenVAS SVN repository. A fresh tarball containing the latest stable release can be obtained from: * http://wald.intevation.org/frs/download.php/829/openvas-manager-1.0.4.ta r.gz In the event that OpenVAS has been supplied as part of a distribution then the vendor or organisation concerned should be contacted for a patch. History On 14th January 2011, Ronald Kingma contacted Greenbone Networks to report the described vulnerability affecting OpenVAS Manager. Greenbone Networks began working on patches to resolve the vulnerability. Over the weekend of the 15th and 16th of January, Greenbone Networks applied patches to resolve the vulnerability in trunk and the 1.0 branch respectively. On the 17th, Greenbone Networks contacted the OpenVAS security team to notify them of the vulnerability and request assistance in coordinating the disclosure. The OpenVAS security team, Greenbone Networks and Ronald opened a dialogue in order to draft this advisory and on the 18th, CVE-2011-0018 was assigned for this vulnerability. The OpenVAS security team continued evaluating the vulnerability, identifying that it may also be triggered using a cross-site request forgery based attack. OpenVAS Manager 1.0.4 was released on the 19th. Thanks OpenVAS would like to thank Ronald Kingma and Alexander van Eee of ISSX for their help in reporting the vulnerability. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux) iQIcBAABCAAGBQJNPrfPAAoJEPJhpTVyySo71YkQAMFHectZJUW8CZ4i4+w4v4OO THVIFh3mJHUVrKnJerueEPk0cxmMvnIoAhx6L9gbrNbQccPWW7vS64zSJaY3Os9+ u4GVIFIr3/pPcBL4T8hCRQSs0esJKBPfCNt4YEXFGWhp+s4TkcR9kOs+gFc0kfrw Zc5fWDG/fJvEh5RyIGSj+dKvVjCa5hvsPqXl0pN6Dr2DscCVwX2I3yyy7bOJAwAp BY68qqFWorshWC9KdvkcYSuSdkTZmIOHFsafcvXn1Po/e5zGp9U+smA4zxy67s/o wry3VxSJf/CzLKuK+GCDBPjfx3PnvoWxyZeDfuJ6Tikk8aOpPA28bvVliXFViR5I 4GmNo/e6QUxio7jYjW4hmh2HmNAGjNmAhibaHDmuRtR7Qq25I9EL9DiX2oH0ytNB AwTB6syFm88E8LQPm2vSMn/GKcitK97rdyUQ/lBcPU419SPBWYC3Wr2pkR9EiSw6 AjyRrUqe3EC+IAYn6xmOdKyuNXsAvobe57a3AeyUON3tuMVCfWZu4tlYEjHO/bY9 rlfO1Oqj0ZziBmLwVyXHpjZVYnms8WTSV479jUfCbUckxJsXB8cLnV72TPoBd2Zy ha+JgGwGt0BUPcq1MzLhjqYGg2VPYzKCtlcql74F/cRgEF/wvXjys53Vhv17Cukb pg+nMuyc9kAdHLnkvLR6 =MOuA -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----