A vulnerability affecting all versions of the GoAhead web server prior to version 3.6.5 can be exploited to achieve remote code execution (RCE) on Internet of Things (IoT) devices.
GoAhead is a small web server employed by numerous companies, including IBM, HP, Oracle, Boeing, D-link, and Motorola, is “deployed in hundreds of millions of devices and is ideal for the smallest of embedded devices,” according to EmbedThis, its developer.
The web server is currently present on over 700,000 Internet-connected devices out there, a Shodan search has revealed.
However, not all of these devices are impacted by said remote code execution vulnerability. Tracked as CVE-2017-17562, the vulnerability is triggered only in special conditions and affects only devices with servers running *nix that also have CGI support enabled with dynamically linked executables (CGI scripts).
Discovered by Elttam security researchers, the flaw is the “result of initializing the environment of forked CGI scripts using untrusted HTTP request parameters.” If the aforementioned conditions are met, the behavior can be abused for remote code execution when combined with the glibc dynamic linker, using special variables such as LD_PRELOAD.
The security researchers discovered that the issue affects all versions of the GoAhead source since at least 2.5.0, with the optional CGI support enabled.
The bug resides in the cgiHandler function, “which starts by allocating an array of pointers for the envp argument of the new process, followed by initializing it with the key-value pairs taken from HTTP request parameters. Finally, the launchCgi function is called which forks and execve’s the CGI script,” Elttam explains.
While REMOTE_HOST and HTTP_AUTHORIZATION are filtered, the remaining parameters are considered trusted and are passed along unfiltered. Thus, an attacker can control arbitrary environment variables used in a new CGI process.
To resolve the issue, EmbedThis introduced a skip for special parameter names and a prefix of all other parameters with a static string. This patch should resolve the issue even when parameters of the form a=b%00LD_PRELOAD%3D are used, Elttam says.
The issue, the researchers say, could exist in other services as well, not only in GoAhead web servers compiled with CGI support enabled.
“Although the CGI handling code remained relatively stable in all versions of the web server (which made it the ideal target), there has been a significant amount of code churn over the years in other modules. It’s possible there are other interesting vulnerabilities [in the web server],” Elttam concludes.
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