CVE-2021-20110

Due to Manage Engine Asset Explorer Agent 1.0.34 not validating HTTPS certificates, an attacker on the network can statically configure their IP address to match the Asset Explorers Server IP address. This will allow an attacker to send a NEWSCAN request to a listening agent on the network as well as receive the agents HTTP request verifying its authtoken. In httphandler.cpp, the agent reaching out over HTTP is vulnerable to an Integer Overflow, which can be turned into a Heap Overflow allowing for remote code execution as NT AUTHORITY/SYSTEM on the agent machine. The Integer Overflow occurs when receiving POST response from the Manage Engine server, and the agent calling HttpQueryInfoW in order to get the Content-Length size from the incoming POST request. This size is taken, but multiplied to a larger amount. If an attacker specifies a Content-Length size of 1073741823 or larger, this integer arithmetic will wrap the value back around to smaller integer, then calls calloc with this size to allocate memory. The following API InternetReadFile will copy the POST data into this buffer, which will be too small for the contents, and cause heap overflow.

Weakness

The product performs a calculation that can produce an integer overflow or wraparound, when the logic assumes that the resulting value will always be larger than the original value. This can introduce other weaknesses when the calculation is used for resource management or execution control.

Affected Software

Potential Mitigations

• Use a language that does not allow this weakness to occur or provides constructs that make this weakness easier to avoid.
• If possible, choose a language or compiler that performs automatic bounds checking.
• Use a vetted library or framework that does not allow this weakness to occur or provides constructs that make this weakness easier to avoid.
• Use libraries or frameworks that make it easier to handle numbers without unexpected consequences.
• Examples include safe integer handling packages such as SafeInt (C++) or IntegerLib (C or C++). [REF-106]
• Perform input validation on any numeric input by ensuring that it is within the expected range. Enforce that the input meets both the minimum and maximum requirements for the expected range.
• Use unsigned integers where possible. This makes it easier to perform validation for integer overflows. When signed integers are required, ensure that the range check includes minimum values as well as maximum values.
• Understand the programming language’s underlying representation and how it interacts with numeric calculation (CWE-681). Pay close attention to byte size discrepancies, precision, signed/unsigned distinctions, truncation, conversion and casting between types, “not-a-number” calculations, and how the language handles numbers that are too large or too small for its underlying representation. [REF-7]
• Also be careful to account for 32-bit, 64-bit, and other potential differences that may affect the numeric representation.

Related Attack Patterns

• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/92.html

References

• https://www.tenable.com/security/research/tra-2021-31