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Security Alert! Moxa ThingsPro IIoT Gateway and Device Management Software (Oct 2018)

Security Alert – Moxa ThingsPro IIoT Gateway and Device Management Software Solutions version 2.1.

MQTT (formerly MQ Telemetry Transport) is an ISO standard (ISO/IEC PRF 20922) publish-subscribe-based “lightweight” messaging protocol for use on top of the TCP/IP protocol. Since the original design objective of this protocol not for handling confidential information and therefore cyber security not the major focus. Smart City infrastructure work closely with MQTT technology. Moxa products have connected over 30 million devices worldwide in a wide range of applications, including factory automation, smart rail, smart grid, intelligent transportation, oil & gas, marine, and mining. Found vulnerabilities on Moxa ThingsPro IIoT Gateway and Device Management Software recently. If you the end user of Moxa, you must consider to contact your local representative in order to conduct the remedy action.

Official web site url shown as below:

https://www.moxa.com/support/support_home_new.aspx

What is a smart city from an security point of view?

 

Preface

The objective of the smart city is design to incorporates information and communication technologies (ICT) to enhance the quality of life. The Smart City derivatives the cost effective solution. As a result, it benefits to urban services such as energy, transportation and utilities in order to reduce resource consumption, wastage and overall costs.

2 Common Focus (Shared Data and Open Data)

People concerning the personal privacy and therefore the key words data sharing make them scare.As a matter of fact the data breach incidents happened so far let people focus their defense idea on how to protect their personal data. And therefore whatever sharing concept will trigger their defense idea. Meanwhile this is the bottleneck to slow down smart city development.

About public data – Public data is information that can be freely used, reused and redistributed by anyone with no existing local, national or international legal restrictions on access or usage.

Understanding of data classification

Classifying data is the process of categorizing data assets based on nominal values according to its sensitivity.

The data classification scheme – definition table shown as below:

If we all agree on above data classification labels definitions. And do not have concerns (hiccups) for the terms of use set up. So do we have any other concern of smart City?

Hidden item – Technology Risk management – Whether follow the regular software patch cycle (zero day) to smart city?

From technical point of view, government facilities must follow the best practice to fulfill the patch management. However hardware manufacturer not guarantee they can remedy the vulnerability in quick manner. From some circumstances, smart city not only covered the fundemental infrastructure operation. It involves AI integration. That is business facilities join venture with government facilities. So how to maintain a secure environment? It is one of key element in smart City.

REAL-TIME OPERATING SYSTEMS (RTOS)

Internet of Things is growing rapidly, the common standard of smart devices will be designed with Embedded Systems (ESs). Real Time Operating Systems (RTOS) are used in ESs development due to RTOS added important features as RTOS simplifies development and makes systems more reliable. A real-time operating system (RTOS) is an operating system (OS) intended to serve real-time applications that process data as it comes in, typically without buffer delays. Most RTOS applications fall into two broad classifications. They are event response and closed-loop control.

Reference: A closed loop system is one where the output is feed back into the the system as an input in some way. For instance a thermostat.

Continuous closed-loop control

WHILE (Y <> specified_condition) 
    take_action(X) 
    measure(Y) 
    wait(Z)
REPEAT

Event response applications, such as automated visual inspection of assembly line parts, require a response to a stimulus in a certain amount of time. In this visual inspection system, for example, each part must be photographed and analyzed before the assembly line moves.

Reference: A closed loop system is one where the output is fed back into the the system as an input in some way. For instance a thermostat.

List Of Real Time Operating System in the market

IoT devices potential risk

Threat actors exploit IoT device weakness conduct cyber attack. As a result cyber security guru summarizes the following design weakness of IoT devices. Those devices are heavy deployed in smart city. For instance survillance web cam, sensor, motion detector, … etc. The design weakness are shown as below:

6 Big Security Concerns About IoT For Business

  • Default ‘Raw Data’ Storage
  • Insecure Devices.
  • Lack Of Updates
  • Hard to avoid Data Breaches
  • Difficult to compliant Data Storage policy
  • High hit rate to become a DDoS Attacks tool.

Vulnerabilities & Exposure (recently) – FreeRTOS vulnerabilities awake IoT technology weakness. Vulnerabilities discovered in the FreeRTOS operating system can expose a wide range of systems to attacks, including smart home devices and critical infrastructure.

Risk factor: FreeRTOS TCP/IP Stack Vulnerabilities put a wide range of devices at risk of compromise. Researchers from Zimperium’s zLabs have analyzed FreeRTOS’s TCP/IP stack and AWS secure connectivity modules, and discovered vulnerabilities that also impact OpenRTOS and SafeRTOS.

CVE-2018-16522 Remote Code Execution
CVE-2018-16525 Remote Code Execution
CVE-2018-16526 Remote Code Eexecution
CVE-2018-16528 Remote Code Execution
CVE-2018-16523 Denial of Service
CVE-2018-16524 Information Leak
CVE-2018-16527 Information Leak
CVE-2018-16599 Information Leak
CVE-2018-16600 Information Leak
CVE-2018-16601 Information Leak
CVE-2018-16602 Information Leak
CVE-2018-16603 Information Leak
CVE-2018-16598 Other

Summary:

In technology world, it is hard to avoid the vulnerability occurs. Perhaps patch management now includes in modern software and system development life cycle. There are two popular ways of disclosing vulnerabilities to software vendors.

  1. The first is called full disclosure – researchers immediately publish their vulnerability to public, giving the vendors absolutely no opportunity to release a fix.
  2. The second is called responsible disclosure, or staggered disclosure. This is where the researcher contacts the vendor before the vulnerability is released. Vendor is given a conventional 30 calendar days to fix vulnerability. Some security holes cannot be fixed easily, and require entire software systems to be rebuilt from scratch.Once both parties are satisfied with the fix that’s been produced, the vulnerability is then disclosed and given a CVE number. Regarding to above FreeRTOS vulnerabilities, Amazon addressed the issues with the release of FreeRTOS 1.3.2.But what is the remedy status of the opensource application? As far as I know, security researcher agree to give another 30 days to allow vendors to deploy the patches. However the potential risks are valid until vendor fix the security hole.

Smart City infrastructure not proprietary for famous vendor. We can use not famous brand name surveillance web cam, senor and motion detector. Could you imagine what is the actual status once the vulnerabilities occurs?

Reference:

Smart City infrastructure work closely with MQTT technology.

Security Alert – Moxa ThingsPro IIoT Gateway and Device Management Software Solutions version 2.1.

Security Alert! Moxa ThingsPro IIoT Gateway and Device Management Software (Oct 2018)

 

 

Security Advisories and Alerts – LAquis SCADA Versions 4.1.0.3870 and prior

Since it build and run on top of Microsoft windows platform and speculated that vulnerabilities might given from Microsoft itself. For instance: LAquis SCADA Versions 4.1.0.3870 and prior

Integer overflow to buffer overflow vulnerabilities, which may allow remote code execution.

Hints: Microsoft GDI+ is prone to an integer-overflow vulnerability. An attacker can exploit this issue by enticing unsuspecting users to view a malicious BMP file.

Vulnerabilities checklist:

  • CVE-2018-17895 out-of-bounds read vulnerabilities, which may allow remote code execution.
  • CVE-2018-17911 stack-based buffer overflow vulnerabilities, which may allow remote code execution.
  • CVE-2018-17899 path traversal vulnerability, which may allow remote code execution
  • CVE-2018-17901 when processing project files the application fails to sanitize user input prior to performing write operations on a stack object, which may allow an attacker to execute code under the current process.
  • CVE-2018-17897 integer overflow to buffer overflow vulnerabilities, which may allow remote code execution.
  • CVE-2018-17893 untrusted pointer dereference vulnerability, which may allow remote code execution.

Remedy: Upgrade to 4.1.0.4114 or later

LIVE555 Streaming Library vulnerability – Oct 2018

 

The VLC is a packet-based media player it plays almost all video content. It can play some, even if they’re damaged, incomplete, or unfinished, such as files that are still downloading via a peer-to-peer (P2P) network. So it is very popular in the IoT Environments especially video streaming in vehicular IoT (VSV-IoT) environments. However security researchers have discovered a serious code execution vulnerability in the LIVE555 streaming media library.

If above vulnerability occurs in your devices, what will be happened?

If the stack buffer is filled with data supplied from an untrusted user then that user can corrupt the stack in such a way as to inject executable code into the running program and take control of the process. As a result this method is able for attacker to gain unauthorized access to a computer.
So your vulnerable IoT device will be involuntary join into the IoT Botnet army. So please be careful.

The vendor released security patches on October 17 (see below):

http://www.live555.com/liveMedia/public/

Remark: RTSP over HTTP tunneling doesn’t mean TCP will be used. As TCP has more overheads than UDP, real time streaming will prefer to use UDP as less traffic will be made.

Libssh Server-Side State Machine Unauthorized Access Vulnerability – 17thOct2018

Background:
Libssh is a library written in C implementing the SSH protocol. It can be used to implement client and server applications.

Vulnerability found on 17th Oct 2018:
By presenting the server an SSH2_MSG_USERAUTH_SUCCESS message in place of the SSH2_MSG_USERAUTH_REQUEST message which the server would expect to initiate authentication, the attacker could successfully authentciate without any credentials.

Remediation:
libssh 0.8.4 and 0.7.6 security and bugfix release (Refer below url):

Comment: This bug may found earlier than file a CVE record. Cyber World indeed not safe!

https://www.libssh.org/2018/10/16/libssh-0-8-4-and-0-7-6-security-and-bugfix-release/

Yammer Desktop Application Remote Code Execution Vulnerability – 19th Oct 2018

The Yammer desktop app is a native client for Mac and Windows with the full functionality of Yammer. Along with streamlined log in and SSO support, the app integrates with native operating system capabilities such as notifications, shortcuts, and launch on startup.
Microsoft announce vulnerability occurs today. But it looks that it is a old bug found 2013.
Should you have interest of the bud details. Attached diagram can provide hints to you for reference.
If you are going to do the remediation, please refer to below url (Official announcement)

CVE-2018-8569 | Yammer Desktop Application Remote Code Execution Vulnerability

https://portal.msrc.microsoft.com/en-US/security-guidance/advisory/CVE-2018-8569

Unknown APT reference number ? Suspect that it targeting Advantech WebAccess/SCADA customer

 

Advantech, a leader within the IPC global market. Advantech offers a comprehensive IPC product range that delivers reliability and stability for extreme environments, providing its customers with a one-stop shopping experience implementing Industry 4.0 and fulfilling their Industrial IoT needs.

IoT and SCADA are the APT (Advanced Persistent threat) targeting devices so far. Meanwhile this type of manufacturer will be lured attacker interest. Regarding to the technical details, please refer below url for reference.

https://www.eset.com/int/greyenergy-exposed/

So, It is possible to make people predict the attack may targeting Advantech customer.

Factor:
In Advantech WebAccess/SCADA versions prior to V8.2_20170817.
WebAccess/SCADA does not properly sanitize its inputs for SQL commands.

Synopsis:
Chosen with servers that have a high uptime, where reboots and patch management are rare.
In order to mislead people, threat actor will use the vendor official server cert to conducting data exfiltration.
Since malware alive and therefore C&C server is able to conduct hacker job task (exploit the SQL vulnerability).

Should you have interest to know the specifics vulnerabilities. Please refer below hyperlink for reference.

Advantech WebAccess/SCADA – CVE-2018-5443 – CVE-2018-5445

Oracle Releases October 2018 Security Bulletin – Stay alert!

Oracle has released a gamut security update to address high amounts of vulnerabilities in its various enterprise products. The official vulnerability checklist includes some follow up actions given by 2016 and 2017. Perhaps we focus vulnerability in frequent and do the priority of analysis for the score. Even though the vulnerability score is important. But we must consider the vulnerability which allow the unauthenticated remote attack. For Oracle DB, the update addresses a total of three defects. Two of the vulnerabilities (CVE-2018-3259 and CVE-2018-3299) can be remotely exploited without authentication. For more detail, please see below url:

https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/security-advisory/cpuoct2018-4428296.html

VMWARE ESXi,Workstation and Fusion out-of-bounds read vulnerability in SVGA device – 16thOct2018

Malware authors constantly seek new methods to obfuscate their code so as to evade detection by virus scanners. Have you heard shader code?
In order to avoid the vulnerability occurs, VMware Releases Security Updates on October 16, 2018.
ESXi has an out-of-bounds read vulnerability in the SVGA device that might allow a guest to execute code on the host (CVE-2018-6974).
The side effect of the Out-of-bounds read is serious. It allocates uninitialized Buffers when number is passed in input. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability to take control of an affected system.
Official announcement is shown as below:

https://www.vmware.com/security/advisories/VMSA-2018-0026.html

Buzz Lightyear slogan – To Infinity… and Beyond!

TIBCO Spotfire Statistics Services remote execution vulnerabilities – Oct 2018

Theoretically, big data analytics is the often complex process of examining large and varied data sets to uncover information including hidden patterns and unknown correlation. Basically it can help organizations make informed business decisions. Since you can use the URL API to send administration, expression, or function requests to the TIBCO web server. Use the URL API for testing the health of the server, rather than for creating web-based applications.

As a result, without needing to authenticate, an attacker may be able to remotely execute code with the permissions of the system account used to run the web server component. Meanwhile the web server component ( Spotfire Statistics Services) hits multiple vulnerabilities that may allow the remote execution of code. In order to maintain your operation without any interruption. It is suggest to follow the vendor advisory to do the remediation. Below URL for your reference.

https://www.tibco.com/support/advisories/2018/10/tibco-security-advisory-october-10-2018-tibco-spotfire-statistics