Pierluigi Paganini May 11, 2020

VMware is going to address vulnerabilities impacting the vRealize Operations Manager (vROps) product, including two recently disclosed Salt issues.

Recently, researchers from F-Secure disclosed a number of vulnerabilities in the “Salt” framework, including two issues that have been exploited by attackers to take over Salt installations.

The two flaws, tracked as CVE-2020-11651 and CVE-2020-11652, are a directory traversal issue and an authentication bypass vulnerability respectively. Chaining the issue, an attacker could bypass authentication and run arbitrary code on Salt master servers exposed online.

Administrators of Salt servers reported attacks exploiting the above vulnerabilities last week, threat actors used them to deliver backdoors and miners.

Several organizations disclosed data breaches that involved exploitation of the above flaws, including LineageOS, Ghost, and DigiCert.

According to VMware, the Application Remote Collector (ARC) feature implemented in vROps 7.5 uses the Salt framework. The company rated as critical severity the authentication bypass flaw and as important severity the directory traversal issue.

“The Application Remote Collector (ARC) introduced with vRealize Operations Manager 7.5 utilizes Salt which is affected by CVE-2020-11651 and CVE-2020-11652. VMware has evaluated CVE-2020-11651 (Authentication Bypass) to be in the Critical severity range with a maximum CVSSv3 base score of 10.0 and CVE-2020-11652 (Directory Traversal) to be in the Important severity range with a maximum CVSSv3 base score of 7.5.” reads the advisory published by VMWare.

“CVE-2020-11651 (Authentication Bypass) may allow a malicious actor with network access to port 4505 or 4506 on the ARC to take control of the ARC and any Virtual Machines the ARC may have deployed a Telegraf agent to. CVE-2020-11652 (Directory Traversal) may allow a malicious actor with network access to port 4505 or 4506 on the ARC to access the entirety of the ARC filesystem,”

vROps 8.1.0, 8.0.x and 7.5.0 versions are affected by the vulnerabilities, VMware announced that it plans to release security patches are soon as possible. The virtualization giant has provided workarounds to mitigate the issues.

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – Facebook, hacking)

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