Dell EMC patches critical flaws in VMAX enterprise storage systems

The Dell EMC VMAX storage platform. Credit: Dell EMC

Lucian Constantin
IDG News Service
Oct 3, 2016 12:05 PM
Remote, unauthenticated attackers could exploit the vulnerabilities to fully compromise the systems

Dell EMC has fixed six flaws in its management interfaces for VMAX enterprise storage systems, including three vulnerabilities that are rated critical and could lead to the exposure of sensitive files or a complete system compromise.

One of the critical flaws is located in the Unisphere for VMAX enterprise storage arrays, an appliance that provides a web-based management interface to provision, manage, and monitor such systems.

More specifically, the flaw is in the GraniteDS library that provides server-side support for the Flash-based portion of the Unisphere web application. According to researchers from vulnerability management firm Digital Defense, the issue allows unauthenticated attackers to retrieve arbitrary text files from the virtual appliance with root privileges.

Another critical vulnerability was fixed in the vApp Manager application for

Unisphere, which runs on port 5480. This application has a class called GetSymmCmdCommand through which attackers could execute arbitrary commands without authentication, the Digital Defense researchers said in their advisory.

VApp Manager has another critical vulnerability in the RemoteServiceHandler class that allows unauthenticated users to bypass authentication and call several other sensitive classes.

Successful exploitation of this flaw can lead to arbitrary command execution with root privileges, the ability to add new admin users, and complete compromise of the virtual appliance.

The other three vulnerabilities are also in vApp Manager and are rated as high severity instead of critical because they require authentication to exploit. However, all of them allow a low-privileged user to execute arbitrary commands as root and could lead to a full system compromise.