SUMMARY

Symantec’s Altiris Deployment Solution, Notification Server and Symantec Management Platform web consoles install a vulnerable ActiveX control. Exploitation of one of the methods used by this control could possibly lead to unauthorized information disclosure, system information corruption or potentially allow arbitrary code execution in the context of the user’s browser. Successful exploitation would require user interaction to download malicious code.

AFFECTED PRODUCTS

ISSUES

Severity

High 

MITIGATION

Details

Symantec ships an ActiveX control, AeXNSConsoleUtilities.dll with a vulnerable method in Symantec’s Altiris Notification Server / Symantec Management Platform and with Symantec’s Altiris Deployment Solution 6.9. The vulnerable control is downloaded during the initial connection to the web console on the management server to enable authorized admin access to the management server. While the control is not intended to be called externally, it fails to sufficiently validate/filter user input which could potentially allow unauthorized execution of arbitrary code in the context of the user’s browser on a system that has downloaded this control. A successful attempt to exploit this issue would require the system user to be enticed to download malicious content either through browsing to a malicious web site, internal or external to the network, or potentially through a malicious email that contained HTML or script to call the vulnerable control.

Symantec Response

Symantec engineers have verified this finding and released an update to resolve this issue. Symantec is not aware of any customer impact from this issue. 
Follow instructions and hotfix provided below: 

For Symantec Altiris Notification Server and Symantec Management Platform, Altiris Knowledge Base article 50072, available to customers at https://kb.altiris.com/article.asp?article=50072&p=1 

For Symantec Altiris Deployment Solution, Altiris Knowledge Base article 50279, available to customers at https://kb.altiris.com/article.asp?article=50279&p=1

Mitigations

Symantec Security Response has already released IPS signatures, 

23486 - HTTP Altiris Console Utilities AX BO 
50239 - MSIE Altiris Console Utilities AX BO 

that detect and block attempts to exploit this control. Signatures are available through normal update channels.

Best Practices

As part of normal best practices, Symantec strongly recommends: 

• Restrict access to administration or management systems to privileged users.
• Restrict remote access, if required, to trusted/authorized systems only.
• Run under the principle of least privilege where possible to limit the impact of exploit by threats.
• Keep all operating systems and applications updated with the latest vendor patches.
• Follow a multi-layered approach to security. Run both firewall and anti-malware applications, at a minimum, to provide multiple points of detection and protection to both inbound and outbound threats.
• Deploy network and host-based intrusion detection systems to monitor network traffic for signs of anomalous or suspicious activity. This may aid in detection of attacks or malicious activity related to exploitation of latent vulnerabilities

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Symantec would like to thank Sebastien Renaud of VUPEN Vulnerability Research Team http://www.vupen.com, for reporting this issue and coordinating with us while Symantec resolved it.

REFERENCES

Security Focus, http://www.securityfocus.com, has assigned Bugtraq ID (BID) 37092 to this issue for inclusion in the SecurityFocus vulnerability database. 

This issue is a candidate for inclusion in the CVE list (http://cve.mitre.org), which standardizes names for security problems. CVE-2009-3033 has been assigned to this issue.