Ethical hacking company Citadelo identified a vulnerability that bypassed VMware’s underlying security fundamentals. The bug that has been discovered in VMware Cloud Director was caused by a failure for input to be handled properly during a penetration test. VMware Cloud Director is used for the purposes of virtual data center management, data center expansion, cloud migration, and to host automaton tools all over the world. VMware Cloud Director versions 10.1.0 and below are impacted, alongside vCloud Director 8x – 10x on Linux machines and PhotonOS appliances.
A security advisory for this vulnerability
At the beginning of this week, Citadelo published a security advisory detailing the bug, tracked as CVE-2020-3956, which was first discovered in April. According to Citadelo, exploiting the flaw can lead to code execution and one user to be able to “technically gain control over all customers allocated to this infrastructure. The vulnerability would enable a user to gain control over all customers within the cloud. Moreover, an attacker who gains access can modify the login section of the entire infrastructure to capture the username and password of another customer.
VMware says about the bug,
“An authenticated actor may be able to send malicious traffic to VMware Cloud Director which may lead to arbitrary remote code execution. This vulnerability can be exploited through the HTML5- and Flex-based UIs, the API Explorer interface, and API access.”
VMware created a security advisory for this vulnerability to its customers on May 19. In addition to this, the company released new versions of the product with an implemented fix for the vulnerability,
Tomas Zatko, CEO of Citadelo said,
“In general, cloud infrastructure is considered relatively safe because different security layers are being implemented within its core, such as encryption, isolating of network traffic, or customer segmentations. However, security vulnerabilities can be found in any type of application, including the Cloud providers themself.”