SUMMARY

Symantec LiveUpdate Administrator 2.3 and prior install some files with insecure file permissions during a default installation. These files allow full control permission to everyone which could result in arbitrary command execution with elevated privileges on the system.

AFFECTED PRODUCTS

ADDITIONAL PRODUCT INFORMATION

Non-Affected Products

ISSUES

Exploit Publicly Available:  Yes, Proof of Concept

MITIGATION

Details
Symantec was notified of insecure file permissions following a default installation of Symantec LiveUpdate Administrator.  Permissions on the installed files allow full control to 'Everyone'. An authorized but non-privileged user or an unauthorized user with access to an account on the local system hosting Symantec LiveUpdate Administrator could potentially leverage these improper permissions to read arbitrary system files with elevated privileges.  There is also a potential for the unauthorized local user to successfully overwrite arbitrary files or create scripts that execute with SYSTEM privileges. Successful exploitation could result in an unauthorized local user executing arbitrary commands with privileged access on the system.

Symantec Response
Symantec engineers confirmed the issue and addressed it initially in Symantec LiveUpdate Administrator 2.3.1.  Symantec LiveUpdate Administrator 2.3.1 was originally made available to customers through support channels. 

There were public reports suggesting that Symantec LiveUpdate Administrator 2.3.1 did NOT fully address all areas of the local permissions issue.  Symantec has released LiveUpdate Administrator 2.3.2 to fully address these concerns. Symantec recommends customers who have not yet upgraded to the latest release of Symantec LiveUpdate Administrator do so as soon as possible.

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

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 it 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 credits Tenable Network Security, http://www.tenable.com/ for reporting the original findings further identifying weaknesses in the resulting Symantec LiveUpdate Administrator 2.3.1 release.

REFERENCES

BID: Security Focus, http://www.securityfocus.com, has assigned a Bugtraq ID (BID) 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.