Thursday, April 13, 2017 at 1:20PM

Following up on the previous post analysing CVE-2017-5638, we would like to present a working Proof of Concept for Remote Code Execution (RCE) in VMware vCenter exploiting this vulnerability. While understandably a lot of the focus after the public disclosure has been on identifying and patching Internet exposed systems, it is also important to address systems exposed to business partners and internal users. We are publishing the information below to demonstrate the importance of patching internal systems, as they are often overlooked and can pose significant risk.

A few days after CVE-2017-5638 was publically disclosed VMware published an advisory that some of their products were affected, including VMware vCenter. However, the advisory does not contain any further details. VMware vCenter is the primary solution for managing ESXi virtualisation. One of the administration interfaces is an HTTP-based GUI panel. If you intercept vCenter HTTP traffic, you will realise that this is pure BlazeDS format (Adobe proprietary). An example request is shown below.

The main challenge in this case was to identify what part of the application is using Apache Struts 2 and if this is directly accessible to end users. After spending some time searching through the vCenter server, it was noticed that a Struts 2 library is stored in one of the directories responsible for the reporting engine, perfcharts. The file path is /usr/lib/vmware-perfcharts/instance/webapps/statsreport/.

The reporting engine is hosted on an Apache Tomcat server and by searching through Tomcat configuration files, it was discovered that requests to /StatsChartServlet are routed to the engine.

<servlet-mapping> <servlet-name>StatsChartServlet</servlet-name> <url-pattern>/StatsChartServlet</url-pattern> </servlet-mapping>

However, this does not simply produce a valid URL. Looking for URLs containing “StatsChartServlet” we were able to find following request. In this instance we used a Burp Proxy log but other proxy or access logs would also contain the full URL if the relevant functionality has been accessed.

So it appears that the prefcharts reporting engine is accessible via the following URL:

https://<ip-address>/statsreport

Sending any malicious payload appropriate for the CVE-2017-5638 vulnerability to that endpoint:

results in execution of a command (in this instance /usr/bin/id):

HTTP/1.1 200 OK Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1 Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2017 14:33:51 GMT Connection: close Content-Length: 86 uid=1011(perfcharts) gid=100(users) groups=100(users),16(dialout),33(video),1004(cis)

Affected VMware vCenter versions are 6.0 U2a and below, and 6.5.0b and below. Security patches for both branches are available on the vendor’s website.