SUMMARY

Symantec’s LiveUpdate Administrator (LUA) is susceptible to a cross-site request forgery vulnerability which could result in the execution of HTML or script code in the context of the admin’s browser.

AFFECTED PRODUCTS

ISSUES

Severity

Medium

CVSS2 Base Score: 5.39

Impact 6.44, Exploitability 5.54

CVSS2 Vector: AV:A/AC:M/Au:N/C:P/I:P/A:P

Exploit Publicly Available: No

MITIGATION

Details

Symantec’s LiveUpdate Administrator provides infrastructure support for content distribution. Symantec was notified of a cross-site request forgery vulnerability in the management login GUI page.    The login interface fails to properly filter/validate variables in external input.

In a normal installation, the affected management interface should not be accessible external to the network. An authorized but malicious network user or an unauthorized/unprivileged attacker able to gain access to the network and application management interface could attempt to exploit the issue.  Exploitation of this vulnerability requires that once the malicious entry has been submitted to the event log, an authorized admin must sign on to the management interface GUI and access the event log page to trigger the exploit attempt.  If successfully accomplished, exploitation could possibly result in unauthorized command execution potentially to include application compromise.

Symantec Response

Symantec engineers have verified this issue and released an update to address it. This issue is resolved in Symantec LiveUpdate Administrator version 2.3 which can be obtained by contacting your Symantec Technical Support. Symantec recommends all customers ensure the latest Symantec LiveUpdate Administrator 2.3 is installed to protect against threats of this nature.

Symantec is not aware of any exploitation of, or adverse customer impact from this issue.

Mitigation

Symantec Security Response has created an IPS signature,

24077 - "HTTP Symantec LiveUpdate Administrator CSS"

that detects and blocks attempts to exploit this issue. Signature is available through normal Symantec Security Updates.

Best Practices

As part of normal best practices, Symantec strongly recommends:

• Restrict access to administration or management systems to privileged users.
• Disable remote access or restrict to trusted/authorized systems only.
• 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 Nikolas Sotiriu, nikolas sotiriu - it services, for reporting this issue and coordinating with us while Symantec resolved it.

REFERENCES

BID: Security Focus, http://www.securityfocus.com, has assigned a Bugtraq ID (BID) 46856 to this issue for inclusion in the Security Focus vulnerability database.

CVE: This issue is a candidate for inclusion in the CVE list (http://cve.mitre.org), which standardizes names for security problems. The CVE initiative has assigned CVE-2011-0545.