New vulnerability discovered in Cisco ASA, ASAx and Firepower devices

A new vulnerability was publicly announced last Friday (22th of June). It effects all current Cisco ASA devices (all models) and Firepower appliances (please see full list below).

It allows a remote attacker to execute a DoS (Denial-Of-Service) attack towards the vulnerable device and potentially extract sensitive data from the device (credential usernames and active sessions). It exploits the HTTP(S) service on the devices and uses directory traversal to try to gather sensitive data and potential reload the device. The vulnerability is possible due to lack of proper input validation of the HTTP URLs.

The discovery was made by a Polish Security researcher named Michal Bentkowski and was initially shared only with Cisco, giving time for Cisco to prepare patches and updates to its software. There have already been real-life attempts in exploiting this vulnerability due its lack of complexity and how easy it is to do it – there is already a couple of scripts on the internet to automate the process (see links below). Cisco states there is no work-around for this problem and all its customers are urged to upgrade to the patched software that Cisco has released prior to the unveiling of the vulnerability.

How to check if your devices are vulnerable:

If you have not patched your devices since the 22th of June and are using ASDM/CSM or Anyconnect on a publicly facing interface then it is very likely you are affected.

Simple steps to validate if your devices are vulnerable

1. Check if your devices is listening on SSL ports

 ciscoasa# show asp table socket | include SSL|DTLS

Look for open sockets on public facing interfaces

2. Check for presence of a process called Unicorn Proxy Thread, if this process is present, your device is considered vulnerable

ciscoasa# show processes | include Unicorn
Mwe 0x0000557f9f5bafc0 0x00007f62de5a90a8 0x0000557fa52b50a0
 3632 0x00007f62c8c87030 30704/32768 Unicorn Proxy Thread 218

Look for open sockets on public facing interfaces

Affected models:

Fixed Releases:

Customers should upgrade to an appropriate release as indicated in the following tables.

Cisco ASA Software

Cisco ASA Software ReleaseFirst Fixed Release for This Vulnerability
Prior to 9.11Migrate to 9.1.7.29
9.1 9.1.7.29
9.29.2.4.33
9.3 Migrate to 9.4.4.18
9.49.4.4.18
9.5Migrate to 9.6.4.8
9.69.6.4.8
9.79.7.1.24
9.89.8.2.28
9.99.9.2.1

Cisco FTD Software

Cisco FTD Software ReleaseFirst Fixed Release for This Vulnerability
6.0Migrate to 6.1.0 HotFix or later
6.0.1Migrate to 6.1.0 HotFix or later
6.1.0Cisco_FTD_Hotfix_EI-6.1.0.7-2.sh (all FTD hardware platforms except 41xx and 9300)
Cisco_FTD_SSP_Hotfix_EI-6.1.0.7-2.sh (41xx and 9300 FTD hardware platforms)
6.2.0Not vulnerable
6.2.1Migrate to 6.2.2.3
6.2.26.2.2.3
6.2.36.2.3.1
6.2.3-851
6.2.3-85.02

Related articles:

If  you would like any help or guidance please contact www.4cornernetworks.com today.

Foreword:

Malware has evolved so much in recent years and the trend is to keep evolving with ever increasing pace. Traditional Firewalls that use old technologies such as stateful firewalling are not capable of detecting / preventing most of the modern threats. The restricted use of traditional firewalls to lower the attack surface is not sufficient and not effective anymore. Vulnerabilities get discovered every day, many of them critical, server administrators often lack the required knowledge to protect/patch their devices. Endpoints (desktops/laptops/smartphones) are constantly at risk due to the fact bad “actors” are constantly coming up with clever ways to bypass traditional defenses and deliver malware, quite often exploiting the weakest link (the users), companies cannot cope with training users in the field of IT security quick enough.

Before, now and future

It is obvious that additional security on the network layer is mandatory. But the controls that are to be used must meet certain criteria, they must be what the industry call Next-Generation Firewall, meaning the device should be able to identify users, applications, do advanced threat protection using different methods (signatures, reputation, sandboxing) and provide detailed reports/logs for pro-active and reactive (forensics) purposes. All current high-end vendors on the market provide this Next-Gen FW capability. Cisco has done something very clever, it decided many years ago (after the purchase of Sourcefire) that it would integrate the Sourcefire functionality into its Firewall technology and is dominating the market with its next generation ASA products. The result was a very flexible solution, albeit a bit cumbersome to configure. The client has the option to enable just the ASA functionality and hence have only a stateful Firewall, or also add the advanced Sourcefire Next-Gen FW capabilities. Cisco even sells all current devices (the 5500 X series) with a built in Firepower (Cisco rebranded Sourcefire into Firepower) capability. A significant number of customers are actively replacing the older ASAs with new X series ones. Many without enabling the Firepower capability. As mentioned briefly above, the reasons for this decision vary but the main one was the added complexity and the separate management that the Firepower needed. This translates into added cost, as usually these skills are not available internally and had to be sourced from outside consulting companies. Also, the Firepower product cannot just be configured and forgotten about but needs small adjustments and manual intervention from time to time, again adding to the operational costs.

With more customers adopting and embracing the Firepower solution, the solution has matured, especially after the introduction of Firepower 6.1. Installation, integration and support have become more user friendly. Which meant operational costs have reduced significantly. Transition between pure ASA and ASA + Firepower was streamlined and could be done within days and without any downtime for the customer. A small investment in purchasing the licenses for Firepower, as customers already had the hardware, and the additional consulting services could in fact be the difference between a secure network and a compromised one. We all know that this is a very bad and expensive experience. This investment made would immediately start to pay off and ensure a completely different way of securing your network that cannot be compared to the archaic traditional firewalls. In the future Cisco and many other vendors will completely get remove stateful only Firewall devices. Cisco is going to replace all ASA with the new appliances capable of running a united operating system – the Firepower Threat Defense. The switch to this is inevitable, so there are no benefits whatsoever for waiting. The work for the transition/migration must be done and the sooner the better. Simply put, there is more protection and security provided to all resources behind the Firewall.

Conclusion:

We urge to our customers not to wait until it is too late. Don’t be reactive to a compromised network, take the initiative today and avoid the inevitable.

If you already have the ASA X series deployed there are just a few simple steps to attain all the benefits from the most advanced Intrusion Prevention system at the moment.

Why wait? Contact 4CornerNetworks today to discuss.

https://4cornernetworks.com/contact/

The traditional legacy ASA Firewalls (5505, 5510, 5520, 5540, 5580) are End of Life (EOL) and soon will be End of Support (EOS). There are still a vast number of ASA’s in the public realm used as a security device/internet edge firewalls where many companies think they are providing the necessary security, the reality cannot be further from the truth.

These older model ASA’s have the following problems

  1. Hardware Problems

Cisco ASA Firewalls have a Meantime-Between-Failure (MTBF) which is simply the predicted elapsed time between inherent failures of such devices. When legacy ASA’s are out of support it is not possible to renew support contracts as Firmware updates are no longer available, effectively making the devices EOL. Meaning they are a ticking bomb and without support any network can suffer significant downtime when the device gives up.

  1. Code Vulnerabilities

ASA updates are uncommon, occurring every 6 months or so, meaning security holes can appear with such a time gap between security patch updates. Effectively your device is vulnerable and unsecured whilst it awaits the next patch update. Currently legacy ASA Firewalls only run to version 9.1 updates. These vulnerability problems wouldn’t be a threat if default and most deployed scenario is an Internet Edge Firewall.

  1. Lack of new features

Cisco is not deploying any new features to the legacy ASA’s and the major version will probably not move away from 9.1 (when the newest is 9.6 for next generation Firewalls)

  1. Lack of real security

Any working firewall cannot only rely on the Stateful Firewall technology for protecting the assets of an organization. Legacy ASA’s can only run the legacy Cisco IPS with a separate module which cannot measure to the modern IPS technology. The new generation of firewalls have the Firepower functionality which is the industry leading IPS technology.

Challenges for migrating Legacy ASA to ASA X?

  1. Configuration migration

Very often the legacy ASA’s run a pre-8.3 code due to RAM restrictions (RAM needs to be upgraded for post 8.3+ code). The pre-8.3 code is very different from today’s code in terms of syntax. It does mandate the obligatory use of objects, the NATs are the old PIX like fashion and any policies use the global ip addresses (the so called real ip addresses seen on the interface) than the original one (the ip addresses on the hosts). That means that large portions of the config need to be redone (in most cases manually) when you do the switch over.

The sections that needs manual work are: Objects, NATs, Policies and ACLs. That is the recommended approach and usually an experienced Cisco Security Consultant is needed to perform the job.

During automatic migrations, there is always a chance that something will not work so the migration again needs to be performed by someone who understands the migration process, can track down and manually intervene to correct errors or add configuration after the migration. Also, the configuration after an automatic migration is not easily readable due to the creation of objects with automatic naming convention.

References:

  1. EOS / EOL announcement

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/security/asa-5500-series-next-generation-firewalls/eol_C51-727283.html

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