Tens of thousands of servers made by Supermicro could be exposed to remote attacks from the internet due to baseboard management controller (BMC) vulnerabilities identified by researchers at firmware security company Eclypsium.
The BMC, a small computer present on a majority of server motherboards, allows administrators to remotely control and monitor a server without having to access the operating system or applications running on it. The BMC can be used to reboot a device, install operating systems, update firmware, and monitor system parameters.
Researchers from Eclypsium and other companies showed in the past that BMC vulnerabilities can pose a serious risk. Eclypsium on Tuesday reported finding more BMC flaws that appear to be specific to Supermicro servers.
The security holes, collectively tracked as USBAnywhere, affect a virtual media service implemented on Supermicro X9, X10 and X11 servers. The impacted service is designed to allow users to remotely connect a disk image as a virtual USB, CD or floppy drive.
“When accessed remotely, the virtual media service allows plaintext authentication, sends most traffic unencrypted, uses a weak encryption algorithm for the rest, and is susceptible to an authentication bypass. These issues allow an attacker to easily gain access to a server, either by capturing a legitimate user’s authentication packet, using default credentials, and in some cases, without any credentials at all,” Eclypsium said in a blog post.
The company added, “Once connected, the virtual media service allows the attacker to interact with the host system as a raw USB device. This means attackers can attack the server in the same way as if they had physical access to a USB port, such as loading a new operating system image or ..
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