Nagios: Execution of arbitrary code

Background

Nagios is an open source host, service and network monitoring program.

Description

Multiple vulnerabilities have been reported in Nagios:

• Paul reported that statuswml.cgi does not properly sanitize shell metacharacters in the (1) ping and (2) traceroute parameters (CVE-2009-2288).
• Nagios does not properly verify whether an authenticated user is authorized to run certain commands (CVE-2008-5027).
• Andreas Ericsson reported that Nagios does not perform validity checks to verify HTTP requests, leading to Cross-Site Request Forgery (CVE-2008-5028).
• An unspecified vulnerability in Nagios related to CGI programs, “adaptive external commands,” and “writing newlines and submitting service comments” has been reported (CVE-2008-6373).

Impact

A remote authenticated or unauthenticated attacker may exploit these vulnerabilities to execute arbitrary commands or elevate privileges.

Workaround

There is no known workaround at this time.

Resolution

All Nagios users should upgrade to the latest version:

 # emerge --sync
 # emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose ">=net-analyzer/nagios-core-3.0.6-r2"

NOTE: Users of the Nagios 2 branch can update to version 2.12-r1 which contains a patch to fix CVE-2009-2288. However, that branch is not supported upstream or in Gentoo and we are unaware whether the other vulnerabilities affect 2.x installations.