Sophos XG - A Tale of the Unfortunate Re-engineering of an N-Day and the Lucky Find of a 0-Day

On April 25, 2020, Sophos published a knowledge base article (KBA) 135412 which warned about a pre-authenticated SQL injection (SQLi) vulnerability, affecting the XG Firewall product line. According to Sophos this issue had been actively exploited at least since April 22, 2020. Shortly after the knowledge base article, a detailed analysis of the so called Asnarök operation was published. Whilst the KBA focused solely on the SQLi, this write up clearly indicated that the attackers had somehow extended this initial vector to achieve remote code execution (RCE).

The criticality of the vulnerability prompted us to immediately warn our clients of the issue. As usual we provided lists of exposed and affected systems. Of course we also started an investigation into the technical details of the vulnerability. Due to the nature of the affected devices and the prospect of RCE, this vulnerability sounded like a perfect candidate for a perimeter breach in upcoming red team assessments. However, as we will explain later, this vulnerability will most likely not be as useful for this task as we first assumed.

Our analysis not only resulted in a working RCE exploit for the disclosed vulnerability (CVE-2020-12271) but also led to the discovery of another SQLi, which could have been used to gain code execution (CVE-2020-15504). The criticality of this new vulnerability is similar to the one used in the Asnarök campaign: exploitable pre-authentication either via an exposed user or admin portal. Sophos quickly reacted to our bug report, issued hotfixes for the supported firmware versions and released new firmware versions for v17.5 and v18.0 (see also the Sophos Community Advisory).

Liferay Portal JSON Web Service RCE Vulnerabilities

Code White has found multiple critical rated JSON deserialization vulnerabilities affecting the Liferay Portal versions 6.1, 6.2, 7.0, 7.1, and 7.2. They allow unauthenticated remote code execution via the JSON web services API. Fixed Liferay Portal versions are 6.2 GA6, 7.0 GA7, 7.1 GA4, and 7.2 GA2.

CVE-2019-19470: Rumble in the Pipe

This blog post describes an interesting privilege escalation from a local user to SYSTEM for a well-known local firewall solution called TinyWall in versions prior to 2.1.13. Besides a .NET deserialization flaw through Named Pipe communication, an authentication bypass is explained as well.

Exploiting H2 Database with native libraries and JNI

Techniques to gain code execution in an H2 Database Engine are already well known but require H2 being able to compile Java code on the fly. This blog post will show a previously undisclosed way of exploiting H2 without the need of the Java compiler being available, a way that leads us through the native world just to return into the Java world using Java Native Interface (JNI).

Heap-based AMSI bypass for MS Excel VBA and others

This blog post describes how to bypass Microsoft's AMSI (Antimalware Scan Interface) in Excel using VBA (Visual Basic for Applications). In contrast to other bypasses this approach does not use hardcoded offsets or opcodes but identifies crucial data on the heap and modifies it. The idea of an heap-based bypass has been mentioned by other researchers before but at the time of writing this article no public PoC was available. This blog post will provide the reader with some insights into the AMSI implementation and a generic way to bypass it.