Cisco Ironport Appliances Privilege Escalation Vulnerability Vendor: Cisco Product webpage: http://www.cisco.com Affected version(s): Cisco Ironport ESA - AsyncOS 8.5.5-280 Cisco Ironport WSA - AsyncOS 8.0.5-075 Cisco Ironport SMA - AsyncOS 8.3.6-0 Date: 22/05/2014 Credits: Glafkos Charalambous CVE: Not assigned by Cisco Disclosure Timeline: 19-05-2014: Vendor Notification 20-05-2014: Vendor Response/Feedback 27-08-2014: Vendor Fix/Patch 24-01-2015: Public Disclosure Description: Cisco Ironport appliances are vulnerable to authenticated "admin" privilege escalation. By enabling the Service Account from the GUI or CLI allows an admin to gain root access on the appliance, therefore bypassing all existing "admin" account limitations. The vulnerability is due to weak algorithm implementation in the password generation process which is used by Cisco to remotely access the appliance to provide technical support. Vendor Response: As anticipated, this is not considered a vulnerability but...
Cisco Ironport Appliances Privilege Escalation Vulnerability Vendor: Cisco Product webpage: http://www.cisco.com Affected version(s): Cisco Ironport ESA - AsyncOS 8.5.5-280 Cisco Ironport WSA - AsyncOS 8.0.5-075 Cisco Ironport SMA - AsyncOS 8.3.6-0 Date: 22/05/2014 Credits: Glafkos Charalambous CVE: Not assigned by Cisco Disclosure Timeline: 19-05-2014: Vendor Notification 20-05-2014: Vendor Response/Feedback 27-08-2014: Vendor Fix/Patch 24-01-2015: Public Disclosure Description: Cisco Ironport appliances are vulnerable to authenticated "admin" privilege escalation. By enabling the Service Account from the GUI or CLI allows an admin to gain root access on the appliance, therefore bypassing all existing "admin" account limitations. The vulnerability is due to weak algorithm implementation in the password generation process which is used by Cisco to remotely access the appliance to provide technical support. Vendor Response: As anticipated, this is not considered a vulnerability but a security hardening issue. As such we did not assign a CVE however I made sure that this is fixed on SMA, ESA and WSA. The fix included several changes such as protecting better the algorithm in the binary, changing the algorithm itself to be more robust and enforcing password complexity when the administrator set the pass-phrase and enable the account. [SD] Note: Administrative credentials are needed in order to activate the access to support representative and to set up the pass-phrase that it is used to compute the final password. [GC] Still Admin user has limited permissions on the appliance and credentials can get compromised too, even with default password leading to full root access. [SD] This issue is tracked for the ESA by Cisco bug id: CSCuo96011 for the SMA by Cisco bug id: CSCuo96056 and for WSA by Cisco bug id CSCuo90528 Technical Details: By logging in to the appliance using default password "ironport" or user specified one, there is an option to enable Customer Support Remote Access. This option can be found under Help and Support -> Remote Access on the GUI or by using the CLI console account "enablediag" and issuing the command service. Enabling this service requires a temporary user password which should be provided along with the appliance serial number to Cisco techsupport for remotely connecting and authenticating to the appliance. Having a temporary password and the serial number of the appliance by enabling the service account, an attacker can in turn get full root access as well as potentially damage it, backdoor it, etc.
