Several Vulnerabilities Found in Fortinet Load Balancers

Researchers have identified several potentially serious vulnerabilities in products from network security solutions provider Fortinet. The vendor appears to have patched at least some of the issues.

The CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC) reported on Tuesday that a group of researchers called Virgoteam identified a total of five vulnerabilities, including ones rated critical, in Fortinet’s FortiWAN network load balancer appliances.

One of the flaws, tracked as CVE-2016-4965, is caused by improper neutralization of special elements used in operating system commands and it allows an authenticated attacker with non-admin privileges to inject arbitrary OS commands and execute them with root permissions.

The second issue, identified as CVE-2016-4966, is related to a function called tcpdump that allows users to capture and download FortiWAN data packets for analysis. Experts discovered that an authenticated attacker can download a PCAP file containing all packets captured since the tcpdump function was enabled.

Researchers also discovered a couple of information exposure vulnerabilities that allow low-privileged authenticated attackers to obtain a backup of the device configuration (CVE-2016-4967) and administrator login cookies (CVE-2016-4968). CERT/CC’s advisory also describes a cross-site scripting (XSS) issue tracked as CVE-2016-4969.

The release notes published by Fortinet for FortiWAN version 4.2.5 on August 19 show that the latest version of the software patches several security flaws. Of the issues disclosed in the CERT/CC advisory, only CVE-2016-4966 is named specifically, but the description of other fixes mentioned in the release notes suggests that at least three of the other vulnerabilities have been patched as well.

CERT/CC has not been able to confirm that vulnerabilities other than CVE-2016-4966 have been patched. SecurityWeek has reached out to Fortinet for clarifications and will update this article if the vendor responds.

It’s also worth noting that release notes published for Fortinet AscenLink load balancers last month suggest that the vulnerabilities found by Virgoteam affect these appliances as well.

Fortinet is one of the several firewall vendors whose products have been targeted by the exploits leaked recently by a group calling itself Shadow Brokers. Unlike Cisco, which identified a zero-day vulnerability in the leak, Fortinet determined that the remote code execution exploit targeting FortiGate and FortiSwitch products was addressed in 2012.

UPDATE. Fortinet has published an advisory to confirm that all the vulnerabilities disclosed by CERT/CC have been patched in version 4.2.5. 

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