Flaws in Nagios Network Management systems pose risk to companies

Researchers found multiple flaws in widely used network management products from Nagios that pose serious risk to organizations.

Researchers from industrial cybersecurity firm Claroty have discovered eleven vulnerabilities in widely used network management products from Nagios. The vulnerabilities could lead to server-side request forgery (SSRF), spoofing, local privilege escalation, remote code execution and information disclosure.

“Claroty Team82’s latest research focuses on network management systems, starting with Nagios, one of the most popular in the world used by thousands of organizations.” reads the advisory published by the company. “Team82 privately disclosed 11 vulnerabilities in key Nagios components, all of which were fixed in updates released in August.”

The vulnerabilities impact Nagios XI, XI Switch Wizard, XI Docker Wizard, and XI WatchGuard. Below is the complete list of flaws discovered by the experts:

CVE-2021-37353: Nagios XI Docker Wizard before version 1.1.3 is vulnerable to server-side request forgery (SSRF) due to improper sanitization in table_population.phpCVE-2021-37352: An open redirect vulnerability exists in Nagios XI before version 5.8.5 that could lead to spoofing. To exploit the vulnerability, an attacker could send a link that has a specially crafted URL, and convince the user to click the link.CVE-2021-37351: Nagios XI before version 5.8.5 is vulnerable to insecure permissions and allows unauthenticated users to access guarded pages through a crafted HTTP request to the server.CVE-2021-37350: Nagios XI before version 5.8.5 is vulnerable to SQL injection vulnerability in the Bulk Modifications Tool due to improper input sanitization.CVE-2021-37349: Nagios XI before version 5.8.5 is vulnerable to local privilege escalation because cleaner.php does not sanitize input read from the database.CVE-2021-37348: Nagios XI before version 5.8.5 is vulnerable to local file inclusion through improper limitation of a pathname in index.php.CVE-2021-37347: Nagios XI before version 5.8.5 is vulnerable to local privilege escalation because getprofile.sh does not validate the directory name it receives as an argument.CVE-2021-37346: Nagios XI WatchGuard Wizard before version 1.4.8 is vulnerable to remote code execution through Improper neutralization of special elements used in an OS command (OS Command injection).CVE-2021-37345: Nagios XI before version 5.8.5 is vulnerable to local privilege escalation because xi-sys.cfg is being imported from the /var directory for some scripts with elevated permissions.CVE-2021-37344: Nagios XI Switch Wizard before version 2.5.7 is vulnerable to remote code execution through improper neutralization of special elements used in an OS command (OS Command injection).CVE-2021-37343: A path traversal vulnerability exists in Nagios XI below version 5.8.5 AutoDiscovery component and could lead to post-authenticated RCE under the security context of the user running Nagios.

Nagios XI provides monitoring of all mission-critical infrastructure components including applications, services, operating systems, network protocols, systems metrics, and network infrastructure. It is used by thousands of organizations worldwide.

The vendor released patches for each of the impacted products in August.

The researchers created a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit that shows how an authenticated attacker could chain some of the vulnerabilities to establish a reverse shell (remote bash shell) from our Nagios XI server with root privileges.

The experts pointed out that network management systems are privileged targets because compromising them it is possible to have access to every critical network component.

“While this feature might be useful for NOC purposes, allowing users to easily connect to the platform and view information without the need for credentials also allows attackers to gain access to a user account in the platform, thus rendering any post-auth vulnerability exploitable without authentication.” concludes Claroty.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Nagios)