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Nanometrics Centaur / TitanSMA Unauthenticated Remote Memory Leak Exploit

Critical
Advisory ID
ZSL-2020-5562
Release Date
15 February 2020
Vendor
Nanometrics Inc. - https://www.nanometrics.ca
Affected Version
Centaur <= 4.3.23, TitanSMA <= 4.2.20
Tested On
Jetty 9.4.z-SNAPSHOT
Summary

The Centaur digital recorder is a portable geophysical sensing acquisition system that consists of a high-resolution 24-bit ADC, a precision GNSS-based clock, and removable storage capabilities. Its ease of use simplifies high performance geophysical sensing deployments in both remote and networked environments. Optimized for seismicity monitoring, the Centaur is also well-suited for infrasound and similar geophysical sensor recording applications requiring sample rates up to 5000 sps.

The TitanSMA is a strong motion accelerograph designed for high precision observational and structural engineering applications, where scientists and engineers require exceptional dynamic range over a wide frequency band.

Description

An information disclosure vulnerability exists when Centaur and TitanSMA fail to properly protect critical system logs such as 'syslog'. Additionally, the implemented Jetty version (9.4.z-SNAPSHOT) suffers from a memory leak of shared buffers that was (supposedly) patched in Jetty version 9.2.9.v20150224. As seen in the aforementioned products, the 'patched' version is still vulnerable to the buffer leakage. Chaining these vulnerabilities allows an unauthenticated adversary to remotely send malicious HTTP packets, and cause the shared buffer to 'bleed' contents of shared memory and store these in system logs. Accessing these unprotected logfiles reveal parts of the leaked buffer (up to 17 bytes per sent packet) which can be combined to leak sensitive data which can be used to perform session hijacking and authentication bypass scenarios.

Proof of Concept
Disclosure Timeline
10.02.2020Vulnerabilities discovered.
10.02.2020Vendor contacted.
14.02.2020No response from the vendor.
15.02.2020Public security advisory released.
27.06.2021Vendor provides fixed firmware version 4.6.1 with incorporated Jetty version 9.4.41.v20210516 to address this issue.
Credits
Vulnerability discovered by byteGoblin
References
Changelog
15.02.2020Initial release
19.02.2020Added reference [3], [4], [5] and [6]
26.04.2020Added reference [7] and [8]
20.09.2023Added vendor status.