Palo Alto Networks this week informed customers that it has patched over two dozen vulnerabilities in PAN-OS, the software that runs on the company’s next-generation firewalls.
One of the most serious of the flaws is CVE-2020-2018, which has a CVSS score of 9, and which allows an attacker with access to the Panorama management system’s interface to gain privileged access to managed firewalls. This authentication bypass issue affects the Panorama context switching feature, and the vendor says exploitation “requires some knowledge of managed firewalls.”
Another potentially serious issue is CVE-2020-2012, a high-severity XXE vulnerability that allows a remote and unauthenticated attacker with access to the Panorama interface to read arbitrary files from the system.
Another high-severity flaw, CVE-2020-2011, allows a remote, unauthenticated attacker to cause a denial-of-service (DoS) condition to all Panorama services by sending specially crafted registration requests.
A serious cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability affecting the GlobalProtect Clientless VPN can allow an attacker to compromise a user’s session by getting them to visit a malicious website.
Some old vulnerabilities affecting the previous Nginx version included in PAN-OS can also be exploited without authentication, including some that have been rated high severity.
The latest versions of PAN-OS also address high-severity vulnerabilities that can be exploited to escalate privileges, execute shell commands or code with root permissions, hijack administrator accounts, launch XSS attacks, bypass authentication, and delete files. However, exploiting these security holes either requires authentication or the attacker needs to be able to intercept traffic.
One of these flaws is CVE-2020-2002, described as an authentication bypass issue that involves Kerberos key distribution center (KDC) spoofing. The vulnerability was discovered by researchers at Silverfort, who recently identified a similar problem in Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA).
Of the medium-severity vulnerabilities, one that appears interesting is CVE-2020-1996, which allows a remote, unauthenticated attacker to inject messages into the ms.log file on the management server.
“This vulnerability can be leveraged to obfuscate an ongoing attack or fabricate log entries in the ms.log file,” Palo Alto Networks said in its advisory.
Related: Critical RCE Vulnerability Found in Palo Alto Networks VPN Product
Related: Enterprise VPN Vulnerabilities Expose Organizations to Hacking, Espionage
Related: Critical Flaws Found in Palo Alto Networks Security Platform
Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a contributing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.
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