Advisory Details

This vulnerability allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code on vulnerable installations of Hewlett Packard Enterprise Intelligent Management Center. Although authentication is required to exploit this vulnerability, the existing authentication mechanism can be bypassed.

The specific flaw exists within the handling of serialized objects provided to the TopoMsgServlet endpoint. When parsing the input, the process does not properly validate a user-supplied string before using it to deserialize an object. An attacker can leverage this vulnerability to execute code in the context of SYSTEM.

This vulnerability is being disclosed publicly without a patch in accordance with the ZDI 120 day deadline.

11/01/18 – ZDI sent the vulnerability report to the vendor
11/28/18 – The vendor replied with tracking number
01/09/19 – ZDI requested an update (for this and other related reports)
01/30/19 - The vendor PSIRT replied they were working with the engineering team to get an updated schedule
02/27/19 – ZDI asked the vendor again for any ETA for updates for this product
02/27/19 – The vendor replied they would check
03/15/19 – ZDI notified the vendor if these are not patched that the reports will be published as 0-day on 03/28

-- Mitigation:
Given the nature of the vulnerability, the only salient mitigation strategy is to restrict interaction with the service to trusted machines. Only the clients and servers that have a legitimate procedural relationship with the service should be permitted to communicate with it. This could be accomplished in a number of ways, most notably with firewall rules/whitelisting.

• 2018-11-20 - Vulnerability reported to vendor
• 2019-03-28 - Coordinated public release of advisory
• 2021-03-02 - Advisory Updated