Critical Auth Bypass Bug Affects VMware Carbon Black App Control

Jun 24, 2021

VMware has rolled out security updates to resolve a critical
flaw affecting Carbon Black App Control that could be exploited to
bypass authentication and take control of vulnerable systems.

The vulnerability, identified as CVE-2021-21998, is rated 9.4
out of 10 in severity by the industry-standard Common Vulnerability
Scoring System (CVSS) and affects App Control (AppC) versions
8.0.x, 8.1.x, 8.5.x, and 8.6.x.

Carbon Black App Control ^[1] is a security solution
designed to lock down critical systems and servers to prevent
unauthorized changes in the face of cyber-attacks and ensure
compliance with regulatory mandates such as PCI-DSS, HIPAA, GDPR,
SOX, FISMA, and NERC.

“A malicious actor with network access to the VMware Carbon
Black App Control management server might be able to obtain
administrative access to the product without the need to
authenticate,” the California-based cloud computing and
virtualization technology company said ^[2]
in an advisory.

CVE-2021-21998 is the second time VMware is addressing an
authentication bypass issue in its Carbon Black endpoint security
software. Earlier this April, the company fixed an incorrect URL
handling vulnerability in the Carbon Black Cloud Workload appliance
(CVE-2021-21982 ^[3]) that could be exploited
to gain access to the administration API.

That’s not all. VMware also patched a local privilege escalation
bug affecting VMware Tools for Windows, VMware Remote Console for
Windows (VMRC for Windows), and VMware App Volumes (CVE-2021-21999,
CVSS score: 7.8) that could allow a bad actor to execute arbitrary
code on affected systems.

“An attacker with normal access to a virtual machine may exploit
this issue by placing a malicious file renamed as ‘openssl.cnf’ in
an unrestricted directory which would allow code to be executed
with elevated privileges,” VMware noted ^[4].

VMware credited Zeeshan Shaikh (@bugzzzhunter) from NotSoSecure
and Hou JingYi (@hjy79425575) of Qihoo 360 for reporting the
flaw.

References

^{^}
Carbon
Black App Control (www.carbonblack.com)
^{^}
said
(www.vmware.com)
^{^}
CVE-2021-21982
(thehackernews.com)
^{^}
noted
(www.vmware.com)

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OWASP TOP !0

Injection. Injection flaws, such as SQL, NoSQL, OS, and LDAP injection, occur when untrusted data is sent to an interpreter as part of a command or query. The attacker’s hostile data can trick the interpreter into executing unintended commands or accessing data without proper authorization. Broken Authentication. Application functions related to authentication and session management are often implemented incorrectly, allowing attackers to compromise passwords, keys, or session tokens, or to exploit other implementation flaws to assume other users’ identities temporarily or permanently. Sensitive Data Exposure. Many web applications and APIs do not properly protect sensitive data, such as financial, healthcare, and PII. Attackers may steal or modify such weakly protected data to conduct credit card fraud, identity theft, or other crimes. Sensitive data may be compromised without extra protection, such as encryption at rest or in transit, and requires special precautions when exchanged with the browser. XML External Entities (XXE). Many older or poorly configured XML processors evaluate external entity references within XML documents. External entities can be used to disclose internal files using the file URI handler, internal file shares, internal port scanning, remote code execution, and denial of service attacks. Broken Access Control. Restrictions on what authenticated users are allowed to do are often not properly enforced. Attackers can exploit these flaws to access unauthorized functionality and/or data, such as access other users’ accounts, view sensitive files, modify other users’ data, change access rights, etc. Security Misconfiguration. Security misconfiguration is the most commonly seen issue. This is commonly a result of insecure default configurations, incomplete or ad hoc configurations, open cloud storage, misconfigured HTTP headers, and verbose error messages containing sensitive information. Not only must all operating systems, frameworks, libraries, and applications be securely configured, but they must be patched/upgraded in a timely fashion. Cross-Site Scripting XSS. XSS flaws occur whenever an application includes untrusted data in a new web page without proper validation or escaping, or updates an existing web page with user-supplied data using a browser API that can create HTML or JavaScript. XSS allows attackers to execute scripts in the victim’s browser which can hijack user sessions, deface web sites, or redirect the user to malicious sites. Insecure Deserialization. Insecure deserialization often leads to remote code execution. Even if deserialization flaws do not result in remote code execution, they can be used to perform attacks, including replay attacks, injection attacks, and privilege escalation attacks. Using Components with Known Vulnerabilities. Components, such as libraries, frameworks, and other software modules, run with the same privileges as the application. If a vulnerable component is exploited, such an attack can facilitate serious data loss or server takeover. Applications and APIs using components with known vulnerabilities may undermine application defenses and enable various attacks and impacts. Insufficient Logging & Monitoring. Insufficient logging and monitoring, coupled with missing or ineffective integration with incident response, allows attackers to further attack systems, maintain persistence, pivot to more systems, and tamper, extract, or destroy data. Most breach studies show time to detect a breach is over 200 days, typically detected by external parties rather than internal processes or monitoring.

Critical Auth Bypass Bug Affects VMware Carbon Black App Control

References

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