Penguin Computing™ Statement on Eclypsium Reporting of Vulnerable Firmware in Enterprise Servers

BMC vulnerabilities on ASpeed platform with MergePoint EMS by Avocent (now Vertiv)

Potential Impact: Information disclosure

Severity: Medium

Summary Description

Eclypsium researchers identified a firmware vulnerability on ASpeed BMC based platform with firmware from MergePoint EMS, by Avocent (now Vertiv) according to a published report.

With administrative privilege, two specific vulnerabilities were found in the BMC firmware would allow an attacker make persistent and malicious modification to the BMC firmware.

1. The BMC firmware update process for MergePoint EMS does not perform cryptographic signature verification before accepting updates and writing the contents to SPI flash.
2. The code in the BMC that performs the firmware update process itself contains a command injection vulnerability

Mitigation Strategy for Customers (i.e. what you should do to protect yourself)

Update to the firmware level (or later) described for your system in the Product Impact section.
If it is not feasible to update the firmware immediately, partial protection can be achieved by access control for users with administrative privileges.

Acknowledgement

Penguin Computing would like to thank Gigabyte and Eclypsium for reporting on this issue.

Product Impact

Revision History