Vulnerabilities

Serious Flaws Found in Netgear, NUUO Network Video Recorders

Network video recorders from surveillance solutions provider NUUO and networking company Netgear are plagued by several unpatched vulnerabilities, researchers and the CERT Coordination Center warned last week.

Eduard Kovacs

August 8, 2016

The security holes affect a web management interface developed by NUUO. The vulnerable code is also used by Netgear and possibly other vendors. The list of network video recorders (NVRs) confirmed to be vulnerable includes NUUO NVRmini 2, NVRsolo, and Crystal, and Netgear ReadyNAS Surveillance.

Pedro Ribeiro of Agile Information Security discovered a total of seven vulnerabilities, including backdoors, hardcoded credentials, and issues that can be leveraged for arbitrary code and command execution.

Two of the flaws have been described as input validation issues (CVE-2016-5674 and CVE-2016-5675). These allow unauthenticated, respectively authenticated, attackers to execute arbitrary code with root or admin privileges.

Another vulnerability can be exploited by an unauthenticated attacker to call a function responsible for several system commands and reset the administrator password. This security hole, tracked as CVE-2016-5676, appears to have been patched in the latest versions of NUUO products.

Ribeiro also found an information disclosure bug (CVE-2016-5677) that allows a remote, unauthenticated attacker to view details on system processes, available memory and filesystem status by accessing a hidden page with a hardcoded username and password.

Hardcoded credentials have also been found by the expert in NUUO NVRmini 2 and NVRsolo firmware. While the password hashes have not been cracked by Ribeiro, an attacker who does crack them could log in to the affected devices with root privileges (CVE-2016-5678).

The last two issues uncovered by the researcher can be exploited for executing arbitrary OS commands (CVE-2016-5679) and arbitrary code (CVE-2016-5680). The flaws can be exploited locally by any user, but they can also be exploited remotely by an attacker who obtains admin privileges.

Ribeiro has released proof-of-concept (PoC) code for each of the flaws and, in some cases, even Metasploit modules. The researcher and CERT/CC have been trying to inform the vendors about the vulnerabilities since late February, but NUUO has been unresponsive and Netgear only confirmed receiving the vulnerability details.

Additional information on these vulnerabilities and affected firmware versions are available in advisories published by Ribeiro and CERT/CC.

Written By Eduard Kovacs

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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