VMware Patches Multiple Vulnerabilities in Workspace ONE, Identity and Lifecycle Manager and vRealize (VMSA-2022-0011)

VMware cautions organizations to patch or mitigate several serious vulnerabilities across multiple products.

Background

On April 6, VMware published an advisory (VMSA-2022-0011) addressing eight vulnerabilities across a number of VMware products:

Affected products include:

All eight vulnerabilities were disclosed to VMware by Steven Seeley, a security researcher with Qihoo 360 Vulnerability Research Institute.

Analysis

CVE-2022-22954 is a server-side template injection vulnerability in the VMware Workspace ONE Access and Identity Manager. This vulnerability was assigned a CVSSv3 score of 9.8. An unauthenticated attacker with network access could exploit this vulnerability by sending a specially crafted request to a vulnerable VMware Workspace ONE or Identity Manager. Successful exploitation could result in remote code execution by exploiting a server-side template injection flaw.

CVE-2022-22955 and CVE-2022-22956 are a pair of authentication bypass vulnerabilities in the OAuth 2.0 Access Control Services (ACS) framework within VMware Workspace ONE. Both of these vulnerabilities were assigned a CVSSv3 score of 9.8. An unauthenticated attacker could send specially crafted requests to vulnerable and exposed OAuth2.0 endpoints in VMware Workspace ONE in order to successfully authenticate to the Workspace ONE instance.

These three vulnerabilities are the only ones patched in this advisory that do not require authentication prior to exploitation. The remaining five do, and as such, have been assigned lower CVSSv3 scores.

Russian state-sponsored actors have targeted VMware Workspace ONE in the past

In December 2020, the National Security Agency revealed that Russian state-sponsored threat actors had exploitedCVE-2020-4006, a command injection flaw in the administrative configurator component across a number of VMware products including Workspace ONE Access, Identity Manager, Cloud Foundation and vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager.

While the vulnerabilities in VMSA-2022-0011 were addressed as part of a coordinated disclosure, attackers do routinely target legacy vulnerabilities.

Proof of concept

At the time this blog post was published, no proof-of-concept exploits had been shared for any of the vulnerabilities.

Solution

VMware released patches for the vulnerabilities in the following affected products:

VMware urges organizations to take immediate action

As part of an FAQ document for VMSA-2022-0011, VMware has stressed that these vulnerabilities “should be patched or mitigated immediately” and that the “ramifications” are “serious.” If patching these flaws is not feasible, VMware has also shared workaround instructions as a temporary solution, but states that patching is the only way to remove these flaws entirely

Identifying affected systems

A list of Tenable plugins to identify these vulnerabilities will appear here as they’re released.

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