Cybersecurity researchers today disclosed details of a memory vulnerability in IBM's Db2 family of knowledge management products that would potentially allow an area attacker to access sensitive data and even cause a denial of service attacks.
The flaw (CVE-2020-4414), which impacts IBM Db2 V9.7, V10.1, V10.5, V11.1, and V11.5 editions on all platforms, is caused by improper usage shared memory, thereby granting a nasty actor to perform unauthorized actions on the system.
By sending a specially crafted request, an attacker could exploit this vulnerability to get sensitive information or cause a denial of service, consistent with Trustwave SpiderLabs security and research team, which discovered the difficulty.
"Developers forgot to place explicit memory protections around the shared memory employed by the Db2 trace facility," SpiderLabs's Martin Rakhmanov said. "This allows any local users to read and write access thereto memory area. In turn, this enables accessing critically sensitive data also because of the ability to vary how the trace subsystem functions, leading to a denial of service condition within the database."
IBM released a patch on June 30 to remediate the vulnerability.
data-security
CVE-2020-4414 is caused by the unsafe usage of shared memory the Db2 trace utility employs to exchange information with the underlying OS on the system.
The Db2 trace utility is employed to record Db2 data and events, including reporting Db2 system information, collecting data required for performance analysis and tuning, and capture data access audit trail for security purposes.
Given that the shared memory stores sensitive information, an attacker with access to the system could create a malicious application to overwrite the memory with rogue data dedicated to tracing data.
"This means an unprivileged local user can abuse this to cause a denial of service condition just by writing incorrect data over that memory section," Rakhmanov said.
Even more concerning, a low-privileged process running on an equivalent computer because the Db2 database could alter Db2 trace and capture sensitive data and use the knowledge to hold out other attacks.
If the flaw sounds familiar, that's because it is the same sort of memory leakage vulnerability that impacted Cisco's WebEx video conferencing service (CVE-2020-3347) that would local authenticated attackers to urge hold of usernames, authentication tokens, and meeting information.
It's recommended that Db2 users update their software to the newest version to mitigate the danger.
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August 21, 2020
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