Vulnerability Note VU#999884

TIBCO Rendezvous is a distributed messaging software platform. A buffer overflow vulnerability has been discovered in the HTTP administrative interface of several TIBCO Rendezvous daemon components. According to the vendor, the following products are affected:

• TIBCO Rendezvous versions below 7.5.1
• TIBCO Runtime Agent (TRA) versions below 5.4
• TIBCO Hawk versions below 4.6.1
  
  The following components are affected:
  
• TIBCO Rendezvous Routing Daemon (rvrd)
• TIBCO Rendezvous Secure Routing Daemon (rvsrd)
• TIBCO Rendezvous Secure Daemon (rvsd)
• TIBCO Rendezvous Cache (rvcache)
• TIBCO Rendezvous Agent (rva)

A remote attacker may be able to execute arbitrary code on an affected system. The impact of exploitation varies depending on the operating system of the affected system, configuration options of the daemon, and the privileges of the user that invokes the daemon. TIBCO states the following:

On Unix based systems, the successful exploit will allow arbitrary code execution with the privileges of the user that invoked that daemon, with the exception of user id 0 ("root").  If the daemon component was invoked by user id 0, a successful exploit will result in access to privileges of user id 65534 ("nobody").

On Windows based systems, the successful exploit will allow arbitrary code execution with the privileges of the user that invoked that daemon.  If the daemon component is installed as a system service, this will result in access to system privileges.

Upgrade

TIBCO Software, Inc. has released updated versions of the affected software to address this vulnerability. Users are strongly encouraged to upgrade to TIBCO Rendezvous version 7.5.1 or later. More information can be found in the TIBCO Rendezvous Security Advisory FAQ for this issue.

Workarounds

TIBCO recommends that users who are not able to upgrade employ the following workarounds:

• Disable the HTTP administrative interface by use of the "-no-http" option.  This will block the vulnerability completely.
• Set the administrative username and password of the daemon component.  This will restrict access to the vulnerability to users possessing administrative access to the daemon component.  It is also recommended that the administration interface be restricted to HTTPS by use of the "-https-only" option.
• Restrict access to the HTTP administrative interface to users on the local host by use of the "-http" and "-https" options (example: "-http 127.0.0.1:7580 -https 127.0.0.1:7585").  This will restrict access to the vulnerability to users with login access to the host.
• Use a user with restricted privileges to invoke the daemon components.
• On Unix systems, invoke the daemon components from a chroot environment.  This will restrict the ability to access or modify information in the event of a successful exploit.