An XML external entity (XXE) vulnerability has been found and patched in the SimpleMDM Apple device management solution, but the researcher who found the flaw and the vendor disagree on its impact.
SimpleMDM is an increasingly popular mobile device management (MDM) solution used by companies such as FedEx, Deloitte and the Discovery Channel.
Nishaanth Guna, senior security researcher at mobile security startup AppKnox, discovered an XXE vulnerability on the a.simplemdm.com domain. Since it appeared to be a production server, Guna only pinged his own server to verify the issue, but did not escalate it further and immediately reported it to SimpleMDM.
However, he believes the vulnerability could have been exploited for various purposes, including port scanning, reading arbitrary files from the system, and taking over the admin portal used to manage devices.
“The baseline for creating a proof-of-concept for XXE is port scanning and verifying if you get a hit from the vulnerable server,” Guna told SecurityWeek. “So, technically if the server is accepting an external DTD [document type definition], which is true in this case, an attacker can craft a different request to read files from the server, which always happens if the server is vulnerable to XXE.”
According to the researcher, the impacted servers are exposed to the internet and the vulnerability could have been exploited without authentication by sending a specially crafted request. All an attacker needed to launch an exploit was the address of the targeted server.
Guna believes that the vulnerability could have been exploited for port scanning, which allows an attacker to scan other devices inside and outside the network.
“For instance, if the application server is hosted at simplemdm.com, an attacker can exploit this and port scan, ..
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