"F5 BIG-IP Vulnerability Can Lead to DoS, Code Execution"
F5 has recently warned of a high-severity format string vulnerability in BIG-IP that could allow an authenticated attacker to cause a denial-of-service (DoS) condition and potentially execute arbitrary code. Tracked as CVE-2023-22374, the security defect impacts iControl SOAP, an open API that enables the communication between systems, which runs as root. The SOAP interface is accessible from the network, either via the BIG-IP management port and/or self IP addresses, and is restricted to administrative accounts. Security researchers at Rapid7, who identified the bug, explained that exploitation is possible by inserting format string specifiers into specific parameters that are passed into the syslog function, resulting in the service reading and writing memory addresses referenced from the stack. The researchers noted that the attacker cannot read the memory unless they have access to the syslog. The researchers stated that it is "difficult to influence the specific addresses read and written, which makes this vulnerability very difficult to exploit (beyond crashing the service) in practice." According to F5's advisory, an attacker looking to exploit the flaw for code execution would first need to harvest information about the environment running the vulnerable component. However, only the control plane, but not the data plane, is exposed by this bug. The researchers noted that the most likely impact of a successful attack is to crash the server process. A skilled attacker could potentially develop a remote code execution exploit, which would run code on the F5 BIG-IP device as the root user. The vulnerability impacts BIG-IP versions 13.1.5, 14.1.4.6 to 14.1.5, 15.1.5.1 to 15.1.8, 16.1.2.2 to 16.1.3, and 17.0.0. No patch is currently available for the vulnerability, but F5 says an engineering hotfix is available. The company stated that because the flaw can only be exploited by authenticated users, access to the iControl SOAP API should be restricted to trusted users.
SecurityWeek reports: "F5 BIG-IP Vulnerability Can Lead to DoS, Code Execution"