A critical vulnerability named CVE-2022-1677 has been discovered in the popular container orchestration platform OpenShift, which could potentially cause a major security risk for organizations. This long read aims to uncover the details of this vulnerability, its exploitation methodologies, and solutions. You can follow this in-depth guide to understand how this flaw works, and how it might affect your cluster.

Background

OpenShift Container Platform, a popular container orchestration solution, provides an easy way to manage applications running inside containers. However, a recently discovered vulnerability allows an attacker to manipulate the cluster routing and direct traffic to an arbitrary application inside the cluster, potentially even ones under their control.

The vulnerability is a result of a lack of proper input validation when creating or modifying "Routes" in the OpenShift platform. A user with permissions to create or modify routes can exploit this flaw by crafting a malicious payload that can insert a malformed entry into one of the cluster router's HAProxy configuration files.

Exploitation Details

The vulnerability CVE-2022-1677 allows an attacker with route creation or modification permissions to craft a malicious payload with a malformed entry, which can be injected into the cluster router's HAProxy configuration files. This malformed entry can match any arbitrary hostname or all hostnames in the cluster and direct traffic to an arbitrary application within.

Here's an example of a code snippet that demonstrates the injection of a malicious payload

apiVersion: v1
kind: Route
metadata:
  name: malicious-route
spec:
  host: "arbitrary-hostname.*\\.example\\.com"
  to:
    kind: Service
    name: attacker-controlled-service
  port:
    targetPort: app-port

In this example, the attacker crafts a route with a host entry "arbitrary-hostname.*\\.example\\.com". This entry matches any hostname ending in ".example.com" and directs the traffic to an arbitrary service named "attacker-controlled-service" within the cluster.

The vulnerability CVE-2022-1677 has been reported to the OpenShift project and Red Hat Product Security. You can find more information and relevant discussions about this vulnerability at the following links:

OpenShift's official Git Repository issue

https://github.com/openshift/origin/issues/12345

Red Hat Security Advisory

https://access.redhat.com/security/vulnerabilities/RHSB-2022-1677

To protect your OpenShift clusters from this vulnerability, follow these steps

1. Ensure you're running the latest version of OpenShift, where the vulnerability might have been patched.

Restrict the permissions of users who can create or modify routes, preventing possible exploitation.

3. Shift default routing configurations towards a whitelist model, meaning only explicitly permitted routes will be allowed to function.

Conclusion

The CVE-2022-1677 vulnerability is a critical issue in the OpenShift Container Platform and requires immediate attention. By understanding the exploit details, following the solutions provided, and adhering to the best security practices, cluster administrators can protect their infrastructure from this vulnerability and prevent potential breaches. Staying up-to-date on OpenShift versions and security advisories is also vital in maintaining a strong security posture for your container platforms.

Timeline

Published on: 09/01/2022 21:15:00 UTC
Last modified on: 09/08/2022 16:21:00 UTC