OpenVAS Security Advisory (OVSA20121112)
Date: 12th November 2012
Product: OpenVAS Manager < 3.0.4 and < 4.0+beta4
Vendor: OpenVAS <http://www.openvas.org/>
Risk: Medium

Summary

It has been identified that OpenVAS Manager is vulnerable to command
injection due to insufficient validation of user supplied data when
processing OMP requests.  It has been identified that this vulnerability
may allow arbitrary code to be executed with the privileges of the
OpenVAS Manager on vulnerable systems.  CVE-2012-5520 has been assigned
to this vulnerability.

Current Status

As of the 20th January 2011, the state of the vulnerabilities is believed
to be as follows.  A patch has been supplied by Greenbone Networks which
it successfully resolves this vulnerability.  New releases of both 3.0.x
and 4.0.x have also been created which incorporate this patch.

Technical Details

It has been identified that OpenVAS Manager is vulnerable to command
injection due to insufficient validation of user supplied data when
sending reports to a Sourcefire Defense Center.

The processing of requests containing malicious values for the ip address
or port causes the command below to be executed with the privileges of
the OpenVAS Manager (typically root) using the send_to_sourcefire()
function from manage_sql.c:

command = g_strdup_printf ("/bin/sh %s %s %s %s %s > /dev/null"
                               " 2> /dev/null",
                               script,
                               ip,
                               port,
                               pkcs12_file,
                               report_file);

...
if (ret = system (command)...

As you can see, an attacker can influence both the ip address and port
within the concatenated string.

The vulnerable code path is only accessible to authenticated users of
OpenVAS Manager.

Fix

OpenVAS recommends that the publicly available patches are applied.  If
building from source, then either patch r14404, r14405 and r14421 (trunk)
or r14437 (3.0.x) should be obtained from the OpenVAS SVN repository.
A fresh tarball containing the latest stable release can be obtained from:

* http://wald.intevation.org/frs/download.php/1212/openvas-manager-3.0.4.tar.gz

In the event that OpenVAS has been supplied as part of a distribution
then the vendor or organisation concerned should be contacted for a
patch.

History

On the 7th November 2012, Greenbone Networks contacted the OpenVAS security team
to notify them of the vulnerability and request assistance in
coordinating the disclosure.

OpenVAS Manager 3.0.4 was released on the 7th.

The OpenVAS security team and Greenbone Networks opened a dialogue in order
to draft this advisory and on the 12th November, CVE-2012-5520 was assigned for
this vulnerability.

Thanks

OpenVAS would like to thank Andre Heinecke of Greenbone Networks for
his help in reporting the vulnerability.