Clientless SSL VPN products vulnerable, says US-CERT
US-CERT this week warned of a vulnerability that impacts a host of clientless SSL VPN products and could lead to bypassed authentication and other internet attacks.Clientless SSL products provide web-based access to intranet sites, internal file shares and remote desktops, without needing to install a traditional VPN client.
Many of these products operate in a way that bypasses fundamental web browser domain-based security mechanisms, US-CERT said. Products from Cisco, Citrix, McAfee, Intel and a number of other vendors are affected.
The security mechanism that is bypassed is the same-origin policy, which is enforced by web browsers to prevent active content, such as JavaScript, hosted on one site from accessing or modifying data on a different site. Many clientless VPN products retrieve content from different sites and then present that content as coming from the SSL VPN, circumventing the same-origin restrictions.
Because of the vulnerability, an attacker could create a malicious page that, when viewed through the clientless VPN, be used to hijack a user's session or capture keystrokes.
Through a specially crafted web page, an attacker could retrieve all cookies set by sites requested through the clientless VPN and then use those cookies to “hijack the user's VPN session and all other sessions accessed through the web (clientless) VPN that rely on cookies for session identification,” the US-CERT said. Also, an attacker could construct a page with a hidden frame that could log a user's keystrokes.“There is no solution to this problem,” the US-CERT said in its advisory. “Depending on their specific configuration and location in the network, these devices may be impossible to operate securely.”
The US-CERT offered a number of workarounds, such as limiting URL rewriting or VPN server network connectivity to only trusted domains, or disabling URL hiding features.
