SUMMARY

The Symantec Management Platform agent and task agent installs a registry service key that is used to retrieve software packages from package servers.  The registry key is locally accessible and can potentially be extracted and decrypted by an authorized local user using a static key common to all agent installations.

AFFECTED PRODUCTS

Note: The Symantec Management Platform is used by Altiris IT Management Suite, Altiris Client Management Suite, Altiris Asset Management Suite, Altiris Server Management Suite and individual solutions included in those suites.

ADDITIONAL PRODUCT INFORMATION

Non-Affected Products

ISSUES

Exploit Publicly Available:  No

MITIGATION

Details

The Symantec Management Platform Agent version 7.0 and 7.1 install a registry service key used to retrieve software packages from package servers.  This service key is locally accessible and can be potentially extracted and decrypted by any authorized local user using a static key common to all agent installations.

Access to this service key could potentially allow a local user to gain access to package servers and other network resources accessible with the same service key, interfering with communications between the client and server or, disrupting or modifying the capability of the management server to effectively monitor and manage the client system.

Symantec Response
Symantec engineers have reviewed and validated this issue as impacting versions 7.0 and 7.1 of the Symantec Management Platform and have addressed this issue in the Symantec Management Platform 7.1 SP2 MP1.1 v7 rollup release.  Or, migrate to Symantec Management Platform 7.5.

Symantec recommends customers apply the v7 rollup or migrate to Symantec Management Platform 7.5 at their earliest opportunity to protect from any attempts against this issue.

Customers may obtain additional information from the following FAQ document:http://www.symantec.com/docs/HOWTO85078

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

Update Information

The Symantec Management Platform 7.1 SP2 MP1.1 v7 rollup can be downloaded from:  http://www.symantec.com/docs/HOWTO81832

Best Practices
As part of normal best practices, Symantec strongly recommends that customers:

• Restrict access of 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 credits Julien Bachmann and Michael Zanetta with SCRT Information Security, http://www.scrt.chfor reporting this issue and working with us as we resolved it.

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: The issue is a candidate for inclusion in the CVE list (http://cve.mitre.org), which standardizes names for security problems.