When Turkish researcher Özkan Mustafa Akkuş publicly disclosed a Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerability in the Webmin application at DefCon this month, the Webmin developers went into emergency overdrive mode to fix this issue ASAP. While the ethics of Akkuş’ disclosure without notifying the Webmin team first are certainly questionable, the vulnerability itself is severe and had been hidden for over a year. Even more alarming, further investigation by the Webmin team revealed that it wasn’t a coding error but in fact a malicious backdoor injected into the codebase through a build server.
Webmin is a popular open-source application allowing management of Unixbased systems over the web. This includes management of users and groups, databases, web servers, e-mail, firewall, backups: pretty much any administration of the system. The vulnerability, CVE-2019-15107, pertains to the password expiration function allowing admins to require a user to set a new password at a set interval. By adding a pipe command “|” to the old password field using POST requests, a remote attacker could run arbitrary commands as the root user on the system.
The vulnerability was introduced into the system by a malicious attacker in April 2018 by exploiting a Webmin development build server and modifying the password_change.cgi script. After some users reported that the password expiration feature was encountering errors, the developers reverted to an older version of the file that turned this feature off by default and inadvertently corrected the vulnerability. However, the attacker once again modified the file in July 2018. Even though the build server was decommissioned in September 2018, the new server was built from a directory containing the modified file so the vulnerability persisted until its DefCon reveal.
The Webmin development team stated that version 1.890 included the vulnerability and that the password expiration function is enabled by default, making this the most vulnerable version. Versions 1.900 through 1.920 also include the vulnerability but with the password expiration function disabled by default. Version 1.930 was released following the DefCon reveal, which contains fixes for this vulnerability as well as some Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities. Webmin developers are taking steps to ensure this issue doesn’t happen again, including an updated build process to only use checked-in code from GitHub, rotating all passwords and keys, and an audit of all GitHub check-ins over the past year.
Sources:
• https://thehackernews.com/2019/08/webmin-vulnerability-hacking.html