VMware has patched three critical vulnerabilities in vSphere Data Protection (VDP), including arbitrary file upload, authentication bypass and path traversal issues.
vSphere Data Protection is a backup and recovery solution for vSphere environments. The product is no longer offered by VMware since April 2017, but the company will continue to provide general support for version 6.x until 2020 and technical guidance until 2022.
VMware published a security advisory on Tuesday to inform VDP customers that critical vulnerabilities have been found in versions 5.x, 6.0.x and 6.1.x of the product. VMware has not credited anyone for discovering the weaknesses.
One of the flaws, tracked as CVE-2017-15548, allows an unauthenticated attacker to remotely bypass authentication and gain root access to a vulnerable system. Another bug, identified as CVE-2017-15549, allows a remote attacker with access to a low-privileged account to upload malicious files to any location on the server file system.
The last vulnerability is a path traversal tracked as CVE-2017-15550. It allows an authenticated attacker with low privileges to access arbitrary files on the server in the context of the vulnerable application.
The security holes have been patched with the release of VDP 6.1.6 and 6.0.7. Users of version 5.x have been advised to update to version 6.0.7 or newer.
This is only the third security advisory published by VMware for VDP. Another advisory was released last year to alert users of critical Java deserialization and credentials encryption issues, and one was published in late 2016 for an SSH key-based authentication flaw.
Related: VMware API Allows Limited vSphere Users to Access Guest OS
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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