Moderate
CVE-2022-31661
CVE-2022-31661
Description
VMware Workspace ONE Access, Identity Manager and vRealize Automation contain two privilege escalation vulnerabilities. A malicious actor with local access can escalate privileges to ‘root’.
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Technical Analysis
The VMware Workspace ONE Access, Identity Manager, and vRealize Automation products contain a locally exploitable vulnerability whereby the under-privileged horizon user can escalate their permissions to those of the root user. Notably, the horizon user runs the externally accessible web application. This means that remote code execution (RCE) within that component could be chained with this vulnerability to obtain remote code execution as the root user.
The vulnerability is due to the fact that the /usr/local/horizon/scripts/getProtectedLogFiles.hzn script can be run with root privileges without a password using the sudo command. This script in turn will recursively change the ownership of a user-supplied directory to the horizon user, effectively granting them write permissions to all contents.
To demonstrate and exploit this vulnerability, the following command is executed as the horizon user:
sudo /usr/local/horizon/scripts/getProtectedLogFiles.hzn exportProtectedLogs /usr/local/horizon/scripts/
At this point, the horizon user has write access (through ownership) to a variety of scripts that they also have the right to invoke using sudo without a password. These scripts can be verified by executing sudo -n --list. A careful attacker would have backed up the ownership information for each file in the directory they intend to target, and restored them once they had obtained root-level permissions.
The root cause of this vulnerability is that the exportProtectedLogs subcommand invokes the getProtectedLogs function which will change the ownership information to the TOMCAT_USER which happens to be horizon.
Excerpt from getProtectedLogFiles.hzn:
function getProtectedLogs() { chown ${TOMCAT_USER}:${TOMCAT_GROUP} $TARGET_DIR_LOCATION rm -f $TARGET_DIR_LOCATION/messages* rm -f $TARGET_DIR_LOCATION/boot* rm -rf $TARGET_DIR_LOCATION/journal* cp $VAR_LOG_MESSAGES* $TARGET_DIR_LOCATION cp $BOOT_LOG_MESSAGES* $TARGET_DIR_LOCATION chown -R ${TOMCAT_USER}:${TOMCAT_GROUP} $TARGET_DIR_LOCATION/ }
See the original disclosure for more information.
CVSS V3 Severity and Metrics
General Information
Vendors
- vmware
Products
- access connector 21.08.0.0,
- access connector 21.08.0.1,
- access connector 22.05,
- identity manager 3.3.4,
- identity manager 3.3.5,
- identity manager 3.3.6,
- identity manager connector 19.03.0.1,
- identity manager connector 3.3.4,
- identity manager connector 3.3.5,
- identity manager connector 3.3.6,
- one access 21.08.0.0,
- one access 21.08.0.1
References
