SUMMARY

The management GUI for Symantec LiveUpdate Administrator does not properly protect the forgotten password functionality of the web interface.  An unauthorized individual with knowledge of the email address for an authorized LUA user can potentially force an arbitrary password reset leading to unauthorized access.

The management GUI for Symantec LiveUpdate Administrator does not sufficiently sanitize the inputs for the queries made against the backend database which could lead to unauthorized access to data stored in the database.

AFFECTED PRODUCTS

ADDITIONAL PRODUCT INFORMATION

Products not affected

ISSUES

MITIGATION

Details

The Symantec LiveUpdate Administrator management web interface does provide proper protection for the login/password functionality.  An authorized but malicious network user or an unauthorized malicious individual who can gain access to the network environment could potentially force a password reset of an authorized LUA user.  The attacker would require knowledge of an authorized LUA user’s email address to attempt to force an arbitrary password reset.  If successful, this could allow full access to the administrator web interface.

The Symantec LiveUpdate Administrator management web interface does not sufficiently sanitize inputs to queries made against the database which could lead to unauthorized access to data stored in the database. Successful exploitation could potentially expose sufficient information allowing access to other LiveUpdate Administrator servers on the network or the capability to force network or CPU denial –of-service of network clients by providing extraneous files for download to client systems.

In a normal, recommended installation, the Symantec LiveUpdate Administrator management web interface should not be accessible external to the network which should provide some mitigation against external but not internal attacks.  An external attacker would need to gain network access to launch this type of attack.  This would normally entail enticing an authorized network user to access a malicious link in a context such as a web link or in an email to initially compromise a client system on the network.

Symantec Response
Symantec product engineers verified these issues and have released updates to resolve them. Customers should apply the available updates to Symantec LiveUpdate Administrator 2.3.2.  Symantec is not aware of exploitation of or adverse customer impact from these issues.

Update Information

Symantec LiveUpdate Administrator update version 2.3.2.110is currently available for upgrade as identified in Symantec Support knowledge base article TECH 134809, http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH134809

Best Practices
As part of normal best practices, Symantec strongly recommends the following:

• Restrict access to administrative or management systems to authorized 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 potential exploit.
• Keep all operating systems and applications current with vendor patches.
• Follow a multi-layered approach to security. At a minimum, run both firewall and anti-malware applications 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 the detection of attacks or malicious activity related to the exploitation of latent vulnerabilities.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Symantec thanks Stefan Viehböck (discovery, analysis, coordination) from the SEC Consult Vulnerability Lab (https://www.sec-consult.com/) for reporting these issues and working with us as we addressed them.

REFERENCES

BID: Security Focus, http://www.securityfocus.com, has assigned Bugtraq IDs (BIDs) to these issues for inclusion in the Security Focus vulnerability database.

CVE: These issues are candidates for inclusion in the CVE list (http://cve.mitre.org), which standardizes names for security problems.