Researchers at Onapsis, a firm specializing in business-critical application security, have identified two medium severity vulnerabilities in the database management system SAP HANA (High-Performance Analytic Appliance).
One of the flaws (CVE-2015-3995) can be exploited by a remote, authenticated attacker to access confidential information.
“A remote authenticated attacker, could access confidential information using specially crafted SQL statement which leads him to read arbitrary files from the OS through the database command READ FILE IMPORT available to be performed inside any SQL query,” Onapsis explained in an advisory published on Wednesday.
The vulnerability was reported to SAP AG in October 2014 and it was addressed in mid-January.
The second SAP HANA issue identified by Onapsis researchers is a log injection vulnerability (CVE-2015-3994) that allows a remote, authenticated attacker to write arbitrary data in log files. A malicious actor can exploit the weakness to corrupt log files or mislead administrators by adding fake content.
“Under certain conditions a remote authenticated attacker can inject log lines performing specially crafted HTTP requests to the vulnerable SAP HANA XS Engine. The vulnerable application is ‘grant.xsfunc’, located under: /testApps/grantAccess /grant.xscfunc,” Onapsis said.
This vulnerability was also reported to SAP in October 2014, but the developer only managed to patch it on February 10. The vendor usually asks those who identify vulnerabilities in its products to wait three months before disclosing them.
SAP products such as HANA, BusinessObjects and Netweaver are deployed in numerous organizations, which makes them a tempting target for malicious actors. Security bugs are often identified in these solutions. Close to 400 security patches were released by SAP in 2014, almost half of them being classified as “high priority.”
A recent study conducted by Onapsis revealed that nearly 95 percent of SAP implementations were exposed to vulnerabilities that could result in a full data breach or compromise of business processes. The research also found that the average patch window for SAP products was 18 months.