Discovered - High Risk Vulnerabilities Affecting A Leading Building Management System

Uploaded on 2023-07-07 in NEWS-News Analysis, FREE TO VIEW, BUSINESS-Services-Consulting, BUSINESS-Production-Manufacturing

An independent cyber security consultancy, Prism Infosec, has recently announced that it has identified two high risk vulnerabilities within the Aspect Control Engine Building Management System (BMS) developed by the major international process, design and automation company, ABB.

The two vulnerabilities affect versions prior to 3.07.01 and could result in remote code execution (RCE), and privilege escalation within the Aspect Control Engine software, potentially giving an attacker complete control over the BMS.

Both have been reported and logged as Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs). ABB’s Aspect BMS enables users to monitor a building’s performance and combines real-time integrated control, supervision, data logging, alarming, scheduling and network management functions with Internet connectivity and web serving capabilities.

Consequently, users can view system status, override setpoints and schedules, and more over desktop, laptop or mobile phone devices.

During a recent security testing engagement on behalf of a client, Prism Infosec discovered an ABB Aspect appliance and that the BMS was misconfigured to be publicly available over the internet. Usually such administrative interfaces should not be made externally accessible and in instances where this cannot be avoided a secondary layer of authentication should be used, such as VPN or IP address whitelisting together with further access controls such as multi-factor authentication (MFA).

The Prism Infosec team gained initial access to the administrative interface by using the default credentials documented in the Aspect Control Engine’s publicly available user manual. The team then found that the Network Diagnostic function of the Aspect appliance was vulnerable to RCE which allowed them to gain access via a reverse-shell to the underlying Linux Operating System and associated internal network infrastructure.

Once initial access was achieved, a check against the privileges revealed that the software was running as the ‘Apache’ user, a relatively low-level user with limited functionality. The Prism Infosec team then identified an unintended privilege escalation vulnerability, built into the underlying operating system of the ABB appliance, which would allow the user to escalate their access privileges to a root level account.

“We made the client aware of our findings and disclosed the software vulnerabilities to ABB shortly after. It was impressive how quickly both parties acknowledged and acted upon these issues, from the client ensuring these levels of access were disabled to ABB patching and releasing an update and advisory to their clients" commnented Phil Robinson, Principal Consultant and Founder of Prism Infosec

“It goes to show how well responsible disclosure can work when consultants and vendors are both on the same page and put security first,” Robinson added.

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