CVE-2023-40596

In Splunk Enterprise versions earlier than 8.2.12, 9.0.6, and 9.1.1, a dynamic link library (DLL) that ships with Splunk Enterprise references an insecure path for the OPENSSLDIR build definition. An attacker can abuse this reference and subsequently install malicious code to achieve privilege escalation on the Windows machine.

Weakness

The product does not initialize or incorrectly initializes a resource, which might leave the resource in an unexpected state when it is accessed or used.

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.
• For example, in Java, if the programmer does not explicitly initialize a variable, then the code could produce a compile-time error (if the variable is local) or automatically initialize the variable to the default value for the variable’s type. In Perl, if explicit initialization is not performed, then a default value of undef is assigned, which is interpreted as 0, false, or an equivalent value depending on the context in which the variable is accessed.

Related Attack Patterns

• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/26.html
• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/29.html

References

• https://advisory.splunk.com/advisories/SVD-2023-0805
• https://advisory.splunk.com/advisories/SVD-2023-0805