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KevinLAB BEMS 1.0 Undocumented Backdoor Account

Critical
Advisory ID
ZSL-2021-5654
Release Date
20 July 2021
Vendor
KevinLAB Inc. - http://www.kevinlab.com
Affected Version
4ST L-BEMS 1.0.0 (Building Energy Management System)
Tested On
Linux CentOS 7, Apache 2.4.6, Python 2.7.5, PHP 5.4.16, MariaDB 5.5.68
Summary

KevinLab is a venture company specialized in IoT, Big Data, A.I based energy management platform. KevinLAB's BEMS (Building Energy Management System) enables efficient energy management in buildings. It improves the efficient of energy use by collecting and analyzing various information of energy usage and facilities in the building. It also manages energy usage, facility efficiency and indoor environment control.

Description

The BEMS solution has an undocumented backdoor account and these sets of credentials are never exposed to the end-user and cannot be changed through any normal operation of the solution thru the RMI. Attacker could exploit this vulnerability by logging in using the backdoor account with highest privileges for administration and gain full system control. The backdoor user cannot be seen in the users settings in the admin panel and it also uses an undocumented privilege level (admin_pk=1) which allows full availability of the features that the BEMS is offering remotely.

Proof of Concept
Disclosure Timeline
05.07.2021Vulnerability discovered.
08.07.2021Vendor contacted.
12.07.2021No response from the vendor.
13.07.2021Vendor contacted.
19.07.2021No response from the vendor.
20.07.2021Public security advisory released.
Credits
Vulnerability discovered by Gjoko Krstic
References
Changelog
20.07.2021Initial release
21.07.2021Added reference [1], [2] and [3]
22.07.2021Added reference [4]
11.04.2022Added reference [5]