CVE-2024-3400: What is the Palo Alto GlobalProtect vulnerability?
Author
Benjamin Marr
•
Security Engineer
Updated
April 29, 2024
|
Published
April 16, 2024
|
min read
Key Points
TL;DR
The serious vulnerability (CVE-2024-3400) affects a number of Palo Alto GlobalProtect devices which utilize device analytics. Active exploitation of this vulnerability has been witnessed by a number of organizations.
You should review all GlobalProtect devices which have either the gateway or portal enabled, and apply all patches as Palo Alto makes them available.
What is the Palo Alto GlobalProtect vulnerability (CVE-2024-3400)?
On the 12th of April Volexity, in coordination with Palo Alto released information about a serious vulnerability (CVE-2024-3400) which has been exploited in the wild.
The Palo Alto GlobalProtect vulnerability allows an unauthenticated remote attacker to gain control over the device.
Early exploitation attempts of this vulnerability were identified towards the end of March 2024, leading to the first identified successful exploitation on the 10th of April 2024.
The attack takes advantage of a flaw within the device analytics of GlobalProtect's portal and gateway, whereby the attacker can write a file to the device logging folders that contains malicious code within the name. When this file is processed by the GlobalProtect application, the code within the filename is then executed, allowing the attacker to run arbitrary commands on the system.
Details regarding the exploitation of this vulnerability have been released by Watchtowr which includes a proof of concept to reliably detect vulnerable instances of GlobalProtect. The proof of concept showcased relies upon writing a file that will be ingested by the logging processes which ultimately leads to code execution for the attacker. The file write portion of the attack is a separate vulnerability from the code execution (CVE-2024-3400), which was attributed to the Golang package "gorilla/sessions". However, this has been rebutted by the user FiloSottile; instead it seems that Palo Alto deployed their own similar code which is vulnerable to the file write issue.
Why are these devices targeted so heavily?
These types of devices that sit on the perimeter of a network are a common target for attackers as they sit within a privileged position, bridging the private local network with the untrusted internet.
As such, several vulnerabilities have affected this class of device recently, for example the much talked about series of vulnerabilities in Ivanti products, and a number of vulnerabilities affecting FortiOS devices.
What systems are at risk?
The vulnerability affects versions 10.2, 11.0 and 11.1 firewalls which have been configured with either GlobalProtect gateway or portal (or both) and have device telemetry enabled. The specific versions which are affected are as follows:
What do I need to do about CVE-2024-3400 and how can Intruder help?
Identify all GlobalProtect edge devices - Intruder's Network View can help with this.
Apply the latest patches that are available for the device that you have, and monitor the Palo Alto advisory page to see when the further planned patches have been released.
Current public proof of concepts rely upon modifying the HTTP cookie to write a file to disk. We recommend implementing enhanced monitoring of HTTP requests for abnormal cookies which contain a path, common forms of directory traversal payloads (e.g. ../), backticks (`), or the shell internal field separator ({IFS}).
Ben is a Security Engineer and experienced penetration tester. Previously he worked as a lead consultant at one of the UK's top cyber security consultancies, delivering and leading a wide range of engagements.
Reviewed by
Daniel Thatcher
,
Security Research Engineer
Daniel Thatcher is a researcher and penetration tester at Intruder. His research focuses on discovering new techniques in application security.
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CVE-2024-3400: What is the Palo Alto GlobalProtect vulnerability?
Benjamin Marr
April 16, 2024
TL;DR
The serious vulnerability (CVE-2024-3400) affects a number of Palo Alto GlobalProtect devices which utilize device analytics. Active exploitation of this vulnerability has been witnessed by a number of organizations.
You should review all GlobalProtect devices which have either the gateway or portal enabled, and apply all patches as Palo Alto makes them available.
What is the Palo Alto GlobalProtect vulnerability (CVE-2024-3400)?
On the 12th of April Volexity, in coordination with Palo Alto released information about a serious vulnerability (CVE-2024-3400) which has been exploited in the wild.
The Palo Alto GlobalProtect vulnerability allows an unauthenticated remote attacker to gain control over the device.
Early exploitation attempts of this vulnerability were identified towards the end of March 2024, leading to the first identified successful exploitation on the 10th of April 2024.
The attack takes advantage of a flaw within the device analytics of GlobalProtect's portal and gateway, whereby the attacker can write a file to the device logging folders that contains malicious code within the name. When this file is processed by the GlobalProtect application, the code within the filename is then executed, allowing the attacker to run arbitrary commands on the system.
Details regarding the exploitation of this vulnerability have been released by Watchtowr which includes a proof of concept to reliably detect vulnerable instances of GlobalProtect. The proof of concept showcased relies upon writing a file that will be ingested by the logging processes which ultimately leads to code execution for the attacker. The file write portion of the attack is a separate vulnerability from the code execution (CVE-2024-3400), which was attributed to the Golang package "gorilla/sessions". However, this has been rebutted by the user FiloSottile; instead it seems that Palo Alto deployed their own similar code which is vulnerable to the file write issue.
Why are these devices targeted so heavily?
These types of devices that sit on the perimeter of a network are a common target for attackers as they sit within a privileged position, bridging the private local network with the untrusted internet.
As such, several vulnerabilities have affected this class of device recently, for example the much talked about series of vulnerabilities in Ivanti products, and a number of vulnerabilities affecting FortiOS devices.
What systems are at risk?
The vulnerability affects versions 10.2, 11.0 and 11.1 firewalls which have been configured with either GlobalProtect gateway or portal (or both) and have device telemetry enabled. The specific versions which are affected are as follows:
What do I need to do about CVE-2024-3400 and how can Intruder help?
Identify all GlobalProtect edge devices - Intruder's Network View can help with this.
Apply the latest patches that are available for the device that you have, and monitor the Palo Alto advisory page to see when the further planned patches have been released.
Current public proof of concepts rely upon modifying the HTTP cookie to write a file to disk. We recommend implementing enhanced monitoring of HTTP requests for abnormal cookies which contain a path, common forms of directory traversal payloads (e.g. ../), backticks (`), or the shell internal field separator ({IFS}).
Limited public information is available about the vulnerability.
Red teamers, security researchers, detection engineers, threat actors have to actively research type of vulnerability, location in vulnerable software and build an associated exploit.
Tenable release checks for 47.43% of the CVEs they cover in this window, and Greenbone release 32.96%.
Day of CVE publish
😊
Vulnerability information is publicly accessible.
Red teamers, security researchers, detection engineers and threat actors now have access to some of the information they were previously having to hunt themselves, speeding up potential exploit creation.
Tenable release checks for 17.12% of the CVEs they cover in this window, and Greenbone release 17.69%.
First week since CVE publish
😐
Vulnerability information has been publicly available for up to 1 week.
The likelihood that exploitation in the wild is going to be happening is steadily increasing.
Tenable release checks for 10.9% of the CVEs they cover in this window, and Greenbone release 20.69%.
Between 1 week and 1 month since CVE publish
🥺
Vulnerability information has been publicly available for up to 1 month, and some very clever people have had time to craft an exploit.
We’re starting to lose some of the benefit of rapid, automated vulnerability detection.
Tenable release checks for 9.58% of the CVEs they cover in this window, and Greenbone release 12.43%.
After 1 month since CVE publish
😨
Information has been publicly available for more than 31 days.
Any detection released a month after the details are publicly available is decreasing in value for me.
Tenable release checks for 14.97% of the CVEs they cover over a month after the CVE details have been published, and Greenbone release 16.23%.
With this information in mind, I wanted to check what is the delay for both Tenable and Greenbone to release a detection for their scanners. The following section will focus on vulnerabilities which:
Have CVSSv2 rating of 10
Are exploitable over the network
Require no user interaction
These are the ones where an attacker can point their exploit code at your vulnerable system and gain unauthorised access.
We’ve seen previously that Tenable have remote checks for 643 critical vulnerabilities, and OpenVAS have remote checks for 450 critical vulnerabilities. Tenable release remote checks for critical vulnerabilities within 1 month of the details being made public 58.4% of the time, but Greenbone release their checks within 1 month 76.8% of the time. So, even though OpenVAS has fewer checks for those critical vulnerabilities, you are more likely to get them within 1 month of the details being made public. Let’s break that down further.
In Figure 10 we can see the absolute number of remote checks released on a given day after a CVE for a critical vulnerability has been published. What you can immediately see is that both Tenable and OpenVAS release the majority of their checks on or before the CVE details are made public; Tenable have released checks for 247 CVEs, and OpenVAS have released checks for 144 CVEs. Then since 2010 Tenable have remote released checks for 147 critical CVEs and OpenVAS 79 critical CVEs on the same day as the vulnerability details were published. The number of vulnerabilities then drops off across the first week and drops further after 1 week, as we would hope for in an efficient time-to-release scenario.
Figure 10: Absolute numbers of critical CVEs with a remote check release date from the date a CVE is published
While raw numbers are good, Tenable have a larger number of checks available so it could be unfair to go on raw numbers alone. It’s potentially more important to understand the likelihood that OpenVAS or Tenable will release a check of a vulnerability on any given day after a CVE for a critical vulnerability is released. In Figure 11 we can see that Tenable release 61% their checks on or before the date that a CVE is published, and OpenVAS release a shade under 50% of their checks on or before the day that a CVE is published.
Figure 11: Percentage chance of delay for critical vulnerabilities
So, since 2010 Tenable has more frequently released their checks before or on the same day as the CVE details have been published for critical vulnerabilities. While Tenable is leading at this point, Greenbone’s community feed still gets a considerable percentage of their checks out on or before day 0.
I thought I’d go another step further and try and see if I could identify any trend in each organisations release delay, are they getting better year-on-year or are their releases getting later? In Figure 12 I’ve taken the mean delay for critical vulnerabilities per year and plotted them. The mean as a metric is particularly influenced by outliers in a data set, so I expected some wackiness and limited the mean to only checks released 180 days prior to a CVE being published and 31 days after a CVE being published. These seem to me like reasonable limits, as anything greater than 6 months prior to CVE details being released is potentially a quirk of the check details and anything after a 1-month delay is less important for us.
What can we take away from Figure 12?
We can see that between 2011 and 2014 Greenbone’s release delay was better than that of Tenable, by between 5 and 10 days.
In 2015 things reverse and for 3 years Tenable is considerably ahead of Greenbone by a matter of weeks.
But, then in 2019 things get much closer and Greenbone seem to be releasing on average about a day earlier than Tenable.
For both the trendline over an 11-year period is very close, with Tenable marginally beating Greenbone.
We have yet to have any data for 2021 for OpenVAS checks for critical show-stopper CVEs.
Figure 12: Release delay year-on-year (lower is better)
With the larger number of checks, and still being able to release a greater percentage of their remote checks for critical vulnerabilities Tenable could win this category. However, the delay time from 2019 and 2020 going to OpenVAS, and the trend lines being so close, I am going to declare this one a tie. It’s a tie.
The takeaway from this is that both vendors are getting their checks out the majority of the time either before the CVE details are published or on the day the details are published. This is overwhelmingly positive for both scanning solutions. Over time both also appear to be releasing remote checks for critical vulnerabilities more quickly.
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