Pierluigi Paganini August 06, 2021

Security firm Ivanti addressed a critical vulnerability in its Pulse Connect Secure VPN appliances that could be exploited to execute arbitrary code with root privileges.

IT firm Ivanti released security updates to address multiple vulnerabilities in its Pulse Connect Secure VPN appliances.

The most severe flaw, tracked as CVE-2021-22937 is a high-severity remote code execution vulnerability that resides in the admin web interface of Pulse Connect Secure.

A remote attacker could exploit the flaw to overwrite arbitrary files and gain code execution with root privileges. The flaw received a CVSS score of 9.1, experts pointed out that it results from a bypass of the patch released in October 2021 to address the CVE-2020-8260 issue.

“Successful exploitation of this issue results in Remote Code Execution on the underlying Operating System with root privileges. An attacker with such access will be able to circumvent any restrictions enforced via the web application, as well as remount the filesystem, allowing them to create a persistent backdoor, extract and decrypt credentials, compromise VPN clients, or pivot into the internal network.” reads the advisory published by NCC group.

The vulnerability CVE-2020-8260 resides in the admin web interface and an authenticated attacker could perform an arbitrary code execution using uncontrolled gzip extraction and write executable files in the /home/runtime/tmp/tt/ directory.

CVE-2021-22937, NCC Group’s researcher explains, isn’t the only variation of last year’s vulnerability discovered to date. In May 2021, Ivanti patched CVE-2020-22900, a bug that could allow for code execution by modifying the original exploit to specific CGI files.

Ivanti also addressed a critical vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2021-22935, that could be exploited for command injection “via an unsanitized web parameter.” The flaw received a CVSS score of 9.1.

The company fixed other four high-severity flaws that could allow an authenticated attacker to trigger a buffer overflow condition, conduct a cross-site scripting (XSS) attack or command injection, and arbitrary file delete.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, VPN)

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