A remote insecure deserialization vulnerability exixsts in VMWare Hyperic Agent 5.8.6. Exploitation of this vulnerability enables a malicious authenticated user to run arbitrary code or malware within a Hyperic Agent instance and its host operating system with the privileges of the Hyperic Agent process (often SYSTEM on Windows platforms). NOTE: prior exploitation of CVE-2022-38650 results in the disclosure of the authentication material required to exploit this vulnerability. NOTE: This vulnerability only affects products that are no longer supported by the maintainer.
The product deserializes untrusted data without sufficiently verifying that the resulting data will be valid.
| Name | Vendor | Start Version | End Version |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hyperic_agent | Vmware | 5.8.6 (including) | 5.8.6 (including) |
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.