[R1] Cisco Unified Computing System - Multiple Vulnerabilities

Tenable has discovered two vulnerabilities in Cisco’s Unified Computing System Platform Emulator 3.0.2cPE1 command line interface. Both are exploitable over SSH (authentication is required). The emulator ships with SSH enabled and a default username and password of ‘ucspe’. This account, and the functionality implemented, is designed not to allow access to the local file system other than the files or resources explicitly required.

#1) ucspe-copy Command Line Argument Handling Command Injection

One of the commands available in the ‘CLI shell’ is the ucspe-copy command, which takes two arguments (file name, location to send file to). Using this command, it appears that a direct call to /usr/bin/scp is being used through a system() call. After testing, it was determined that that command does not handle quotes properly. Additionally, the command parser splits the arguments on unescaped spaces only. This, combined with the fact that the second parameter relies on the input starting with 'ftp', 'scp', 'sftp', or 'tftp'. Using these observations, arbitrary commands can be injected.

#2) libclimeta.so Filename Argument Handling Local Heap Buffer Overflow

The ucspe-copy command is also vulnerable to a heap overflow vulnerability. Specifically, if the first argument exceeds 241 characters then the program will write outside of the allocated buffer. The first argument is calling the /ape/ape/opt/sam/bin/ucssh program. Specifically, the library that processes the ucspe-copy input and executes system() (as well as the free() that triggered this crash) is libclimeta.so.