CVE Vulnerabilities

CVE-2019-5434

Deserialization of Untrusted Data

Published: May 06, 2019 | Modified: Oct 09, 2019
CVSS 3.x
9.8
CRITICAL
Source:
NVD
CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
CVSS 2.x
7.5 HIGH
AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:P/I:P/A:P
RedHat/V2
RedHat/V3
Ubuntu

An attacker could send a specifically crafted payload to the XML-RPC invocation script and trigger the unserialize() call on the what parameter in the openads.spc RPC method. Such vulnerability could be used to perform various types of attacks, e.g. exploit serialize-related PHP vulnerabilities or PHP object injection. It is possible, although unconfirmed, that the vulnerability has been used by some attackers in order to gain access to some Revive Adserver instances and deliver malware through them to third party websites. This vulnerability was addressed in version 4.2.0.

Weakness

The product deserializes untrusted data without sufficiently verifying that the resulting data will be valid.

Affected Software

Name Vendor Start Version End Version
Revive_adserver Revive-sas * 4.2.0 (excluding)

Extended Description

It is often convenient to serialize objects for communication or to save them for later use. However, deserialized data or code can often be modified without using the provided accessor functions if it does not use cryptography to protect itself. Furthermore, any cryptography would still be client-side security – which is a dangerous security assumption. Data that is untrusted can not be trusted to be well-formed. When developers place no restrictions on “gadget chains,” or series of instances and method invocations that can self-execute during the deserialization process (i.e., before the object is returned to the caller), it is sometimes possible for attackers to leverage them to perform unauthorized actions, like generating a shell.

Potential Mitigations

  • Make fields transient to protect them from deserialization.
  • An attempt to serialize and then deserialize a class containing transient fields will result in NULLs where the transient data should be. This is an excellent way to prevent time, environment-based, or sensitive variables from being carried over and used improperly.

References