Managed security risk assessment provider Digital Defense has identified several vulnerabilities in the Dell SonicWALL Global Management System (GMS), a platform that allows organizations to centrally manage their SonicWALL solutions. The vendor has released a hotfix to patch the issues.
According to Digital Defense, the platform is plagued by a total of six flaws, five of which have been classified as critical or high severity. An attacker can exploit the vulnerabilities to gain complete control over the GMS interface and all attached SonicWALL appliances.
Two of the critical security holes have been described as unauthenticated command injections that allow an attacker to obtain a reverse root shell on the virtual appliance. The attacker can then use the shell to access database credentials and change the password of the administrator in the database.
Another way for an attacker to access the GMS interface and gain control of attached SonicWALL appliances is to use a hidden default account with an easily guessable password. The said account can create non-admin users who can then change the password of the administrator.
Digital Defense warned that an unauthenticated attacker can also obtain the credentials to the database and change the password for the GMS web interface admin account by exploiting an XML external entity (XXE) injection vulnerability. The flaw can be leveraged to compromise the appliance, retrieve arbitrary files, and cause a denial-of-service (DoS) condition.
A different XXE injection bug found by researchers can be exploited using specially crafted action message format (AMF) messages. The vulnerability, rated “high severity,” can be used to obtain the MD5 hash for the admin password.
The last issue can be used to cause a DoS condition by sending a specially crafted request to a vulnerable system. This medium severity bug can be exploited without authentication.
In its own advisory, Dell said it released hotfix 174525 for both the GMS and Analyzer products to address vulnerabilities found by Digital Defense. The vendor noted that the flaws affect both the 8.0 and 8.1 versions.
“Users who are unable to apply patches to the affected systems can attempt to mitigate some of the risk posed by these exploit vectors by limiting access to the network services of their SonicWALL GMS appliances to restricted-access internal network segments or dedicated VLANs,” Digital Defense advised users.
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