Save Your Cloud: Gain Root Access to VMs in OpenNebula 4.6.1

In this post, we show a proof-of-concept attack that gives us root access to a victim's VM in the Cloud Management Platform OpenNebula, which means that we can read and write all its data, install software, etc. The interesting thing about the attack is, that it allows an attacker to bridge the gap between the cloud's high-level web interface and the low-level shell-access to a virtual machine.

Save Your Cloud: DoS on VMs in OpenNebula 4.6.1

This is a post about an old vulnerability that I finally found the time to blog about. It dates back to 2014, but from a technical point of view it is nevertheless interesting: An XML parser that tries to fix structural errors in a document caused a DoS problem.

All previous posts of this series focused on XSS. This time, we present a vulnerability which is connected another Cloud Management Platform: OpenNebula. This Infrastructure-as-a-Service platform started as a research project in 2005. It is used by information technology companies like IBM, Dell and Akamai as well as academic institutions and the European Space Administrations (ESA). By relying on standard Linux tools as far as possible, OpenNebula reaches a high level of customizability and flexibility in hypervisors, storage systems, and network infrastructures. OpenNebula is distributed using the Apache-2 license.