A flaw was discovered in fence-agents, prior to version 4.3.4, where using non-ASCII characters in a guest VMs comment or other fields would cause fence_rhevm to exit with an exception. In cluster environments, this could lead to preventing automated recovery or otherwise denying service to clusters of which that VM is a member.
Weakness
The product does not properly encode or decode the data, resulting in unexpected values.
Affected Software
| Name |
Vendor |
Start Version |
End Version |
| Fence-agents |
Clusterlabs |
* |
4.3.4 (excluding) |
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 |
RedHat |
fence-agents-0:4.2.1-24.el7 |
* |
| Fence-agents |
Ubuntu |
cosmic |
* |
| Fence-agents |
Ubuntu |
disco |
* |
| Fence-agents |
Ubuntu |
eoan |
* |
| Fence-agents |
Ubuntu |
trusty |
* |
| Fence-agents |
Ubuntu |
upstream |
* |
Potential Mitigations
- Assume all input is malicious. Use an “accept known good” input validation strategy, i.e., use a list of acceptable inputs that strictly conform to specifications. Reject any input that does not strictly conform to specifications, or transform it into something that does.
- When performing input validation, consider all potentially relevant properties, including length, type of input, the full range of acceptable values, missing or extra inputs, syntax, consistency across related fields, and conformance to business rules. As an example of business rule logic, “boat” may be syntactically valid because it only contains alphanumeric characters, but it is not valid if the input is only expected to contain colors such as “red” or “blue.”
- Do not rely exclusively on looking for malicious or malformed inputs. This is likely to miss at least one undesirable input, especially if the code’s environment changes. This can give attackers enough room to bypass the intended validation. However, denylists can be useful for detecting potential attacks or determining which inputs are so malformed that they should be rejected outright.
References