Vulnerabilities > CVE-2020-29482 - Untrusted Search Path vulnerability in multiple products
Summary
An issue was discovered in Xen through 4.14.x. A guest may access xenstore paths via absolute paths containing a full pathname, or via a relative path, which implicitly includes /local/domain/$DOMID for their own domain id. Management tools must access paths in guests' namespaces, necessarily using absolute paths. oxenstored imposes a pathname limit that is applied solely to the relative or absolute path specified by the client. Therefore, a guest can create paths in its own namespace which are too long for management tools to access. Depending on the toolstack in use, a malicious guest administrator might cause some management tools and debugging operations to fail. For example, a guest administrator can cause "xenstore-ls -r" to fail. However, a guest administrator cannot prevent the host administrator from tearing down the domain. All systems using oxenstored are vulnerable. Building and using oxenstored is the default in the upstream Xen distribution, if the Ocaml compiler is available. Systems using C xenstored are not vulnerable.
Vulnerable Configurations
Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE)
Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification (CAPEC)
- Leveraging/Manipulating Configuration File Search Paths This attack loads a malicious resource into a program's standard path used to bootstrap and/or provide contextual information for a program like a path variable or classpath. J2EE applications and other component based applications that are built from multiple binaries can have very long list of dependencies to execute. If one of these libraries and/or references is controllable by the attacker then application controls can be circumvented by the attacker. A standard UNIX path looks similar to this If the attacker modifies the path variable to point to a locale that includes malicious resources then the user unwittingly can execute commands on the attackers' behalf: This is a form of usurping control of the program and the attack can be done on the classpath, database resources, or any other resources built from compound parts. At runtime detection and blocking of this attack is nearly impossible, because the configuration allows execution.
References
- https://xenbits.xenproject.org/xsa/advisory-323.html
- https://www.debian.org/security/2020/dsa-4812
- https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/OBLV6L6Q24PPQ2CRFXDX4Q76KU776GKI/
- https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/2C6M6S3CIMEBACH6O7V4H2VDANMO6TVA/