CVE Vulnerabilities

CVE-2018-19589

Incorrect Permission Assignment for Critical Resource

Published: Apr 09, 2019 | Modified: Oct 03, 2019
CVSS 3.x
6.5
MEDIUM
Source:
NVD
CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:N
CVSS 2.x
5.5 MEDIUM
AV:N/AC:L/Au:S/C:N/I:P/A:P
RedHat/V2
RedHat/V3
Ubuntu

Incorrect Access Controls of Security Officer (SO) in PKCS11 R2 provider that ships with the Utimaco CryptoServer HSM product package allows an SO authenticated to a slot to retrieve attributes of keys marked as private keys in external key storage, and also delete keys marked as private keys in external key storage. This compromises the availability of all keys configured with external key storage and may result in an economic attack in which the attacker denies legitimate users access to keys while maintaining possession of an encrypted copy (blob) of the external key store for ransom. This attack has been dubbed reverse ransomware attack and may be executed via a physical connection to the CryptoServer or remote connection if SSH or remote access to LAN CryptoServer has been compromised. The Confidentiality and Integrity of the affected keys, however, remain untarnished.

Weakness

The product specifies permissions for a security-critical resource in a way that allows that resource to be read or modified by unintended actors.

Affected Software

Name Vendor Start Version End Version
Securityserver_cse_firmware Utimaco 4.00 (including) *

Potential Mitigations

  • Run the code in a “jail” or similar sandbox environment that enforces strict boundaries between the process and the operating system. This may effectively restrict which files can be accessed in a particular directory or which commands can be executed by the software.
  • OS-level examples include the Unix chroot jail, AppArmor, and SELinux. In general, managed code may provide some protection. For example, java.io.FilePermission in the Java SecurityManager allows the software to specify restrictions on file operations.
  • This may not be a feasible solution, and it only limits the impact to the operating system; the rest of the application may still be subject to compromise.
  • Be careful to avoid CWE-243 and other weaknesses related to jails.

References