A vulnerability in the read-only maintenance shell of Cisco Intersight Virtual Appliance could allow an authenticated, local attacker with administrative privileges to elevate privileges to root on the virtual appliance.
This vulnerability is due to improper file permissions on configuration files for system accounts within the maintenance shell of the virtual appliance. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by accessing the maintenance shell as a read-only administrator and manipulating system files to grant root privileges. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to elevate their privileges to root on the virtual appliance and gain full control of the appliance, giving them the ability to access sensitive information, modify workloads and configurations on the host system, and cause a denial of service (DoS).
Weakness
The product specifies permissions for a security-critical resource in a way that allows that resource to be read or modified by unintended actors.
Potential Mitigations
- Run the code in a “jail” or similar sandbox environment that enforces strict boundaries between the process and the operating system. This may effectively restrict which files can be accessed in a particular directory or which commands can be executed by the software.
- OS-level examples include the Unix chroot jail, AppArmor, and SELinux. In general, managed code may provide some protection. For example, java.io.FilePermission in the Java SecurityManager allows the software to specify restrictions on file operations.
- This may not be a feasible solution, and it only limits the impact to the operating system; the rest of the application may still be subject to compromise.
- Be careful to avoid CWE-243 and other weaknesses related to jails.
Related Attack Patterns
- https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/1.html
- https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/122.html
- https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/127.html
- https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/17.html
- https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/180.html
- https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/206.html
- https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/234.html
- https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/60.html
- https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/61.html
- https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/62.html
- https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/642.html