SteelCentral Aternity Agent before 11.0.0.120 on Windows allows Privilege Escalation via a crafted file. It uses an executable running as a high privileged Windows service to perform administrative tasks and collect data from other processes. It distributes functionality among different processes and uses IPC (Inter-Process Communication) primitives to enable the processes to cooperate. The remotely callable methods from remotable objects available through interprocess communication allow loading of arbitrary plugins (i.e., C# assemblies) from the "%PROGRAMFILES(X86)%/Aternity Information Systems/Assistant/plugins” directory, where the name of the plugin is passed as part of an XML-serialized object. However, because the name of the DLL is concatenated with the “.\plugins” string, a directory traversal vulnerability exists in the way plugins are resolved.

SteelCentral Aternity Agent 11.0.0.120 on Windows mishandles IPC. It uses an executable running as a high privileged Windows service to perform administrative tasks and collect data from other processes. It distributes functionality among different processes and uses IPC (Inter-Process Communication) primitives to enable the processes to cooperate. Any user in the system is allowed to access the interprocess communication channel AternityAgentAssistantIpc, retrieve a serialized object and call object methods remotely. Among others, the methods allow any user to: (1) Create and/or overwrite arbitrary XML files across the system; (2) Create arbitrary directories across the system; and (3) Load arbitrary plugins (i.e., C# assemblies) from the "%PROGRAMFILES(X86)/Aternity Information Systems/Assistant/plugins” directory and execute code contained in them.