The Collector Service in SolarWinds Orion Platform before 2020.2.4 uses MSMQ (Microsoft Message Queue) and doesnt set permissions on its private queues. As a result, remote unauthenticated clients can send messages to TCP port 1801 that the Collector Service will process. Additionally, upon processing of such messages, the service deserializes them in insecure manner, allowing remote arbitrary code execution as LocalSystem.
The product deserializes untrusted data without sufficiently verifying that the resulting data will be valid.
| Name | Vendor | Start Version | End Version |
|---|---|---|---|
| Orion_platform | Solarwinds | * | 2020.2.4 (excluding) |
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.