Tenable Research Advisory: Multiple HPE iMC Vulnerabilities Could Lead to Remote Code Execution or Denial of Service

Tenable Research discovered multiple vulnerabilities in the HPE Intelligent Management Center. HPE is currently working to fix the issues and plans to release patches on Nov. 30.

• What you need to know: Multiple vulnerabilities were found in HPE iMC, ranging from denial-of-service (DoS) to remote code execution.
• What’s the attack vector? Multiple listening ports related to HPE iMC.
• What’s the business impact? Potential DoS, information disclosure, and asset takeover.
• What’s the solution? There are no patches or workarounds currently. HPE plans to release a patch on or around Nov. 30.

Background

Tenable researcher Chris Lyne discovered several security vulnerabilities in the HPE Intelligent Management Center (HPE iMC). HPE iMC is a network management tool used to monitor assets and their configurations. HPE iMC is often deployed as a large-scale enterprise virtual/physical management solution.

These vulnerabilities include two DoS attacks, two information disclosures, and a remote code execution (RCE). The dbman service could also allow a remote, unauthenticated user to trigger a manual backup to an arbitrary location on the file system.

Analysis

Two vulnerabilities were discovered in HPE iMC’s “dbman.exe” process that can potentially lead to DoS attacks. By sending malicious messages to port 2810, an attacker could cause a stack based buffer overflow, or reboot the service gracefully.

The remote code execution vulnerability was discovered in HPE iMC's JMX service, which listens on TCP port 9091 by default. This vulnerability can be exploited remotely without authentication. The vulnerability exists due to JMX being configured to start without requiring authentication.

Identifying affected assets

Tenable has released plugins to scan for these issues.

Vendor response

Tenable Research has contacted HP about these vulnerabilities. HP has confirmed it’s aware, and a fix for this will be available in an upcoming release. At the time of publication, HP projects a fix for this issue will be available on or around Nov. 30.

Additional information

• Read the Tenable Research Advisory
• Visit the Tenable Techblog on Medium to read researcher Chris Lyne's in-depth story about his work uncovering this vulnerability.

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