The VMware vCenter Server management software is affected by a couple of moderate severity vulnerabilities that can be exploited for obtaining information and remote denial-of-service (DoS) attacks.
The first flaw, tracked as CVE-2017-4927, is related to how vCenter Server handles specially crafted LDAP network packets. An attacker can exploit the vulnerability remotely to cause a DoS condition.
The vulnerability was discovered by a Fortinet researcher in January, but it was only confirmed in April and patched some months later. Fortinet has published its own advisory for the security hole and assigned it a risk rating of 3/5.
The issue affects vCenter Server 6.0 and 6.5 on any platform and it has been addressed with the release of versions 6.0 U3c and 6.5 U1.
The second vulnerability, CVE-2017-4928, affects the Flash-based vSphere Web Client; VMware pointed out that the HTML5-based application is not affected.
This CVE identifier has actually been assigned to two weaknesses discovered by a Tencent researcher in the product: a server-side request forgery (SSRF) issue and a CRLF injection bug.
“An attacker may exploit these issues by sending a POST request with modified headers towards internal services leading to information disclosure,” VMware said in its advisory.
vCenter Server 5.5 and 6.0 are affected, and patches are included in versions 5.5 U3f and 6.0 U3c.
VMware’s disclosure of the vulnerabilities coincides with the release of vCenter Server 6.0 U3c. The other versions that include patches for these security holes, 5.5 U3f and 6.5 U1, were made available in mid-September and late July, respectively.
Version 6.5 U1 also patched a moderate severity stored cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in the vCenter Server H5 Client. The flaw can be exploited by an authenticated attacker to execute malicious JavaScript code in the targeted user’s context.
vCenter Server versions 5.5, 6.0 and 6.5 are also affected by a bug that allows an attacker with limited user privileges to abuse an API in order to access the guest operating system without authentication. The flaw was disclosed in late July at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, but VMware has only released workarounds for it.
Related: VMware Preparing Patches for “Catastrophic” Struts Flaw
Related: VMware Patches ‘Hard-to-Exploit’ DoS Vulnerability
Related: Legitimate VMware Binary Abused for Banking Trojan Distribution
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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