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

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

SERVER MODELS	FILENAME	CHECKSUM (MD5)	HOW TO OBTAIN FILE:
Relion XE1112	189.bin	a36b6110347ba3628c0654aefe9089ee	[email protected]
Relion XE2112	189.bin	a36b6110347ba3628c0654aefe9089ee	[email protected]
Relion XE2142 (BMC)	189.bin	a36b6110347ba3628c0654aefe9089ee	[email protected]
Relion XE2142 (CMC	133.bin	036794fa7e6d8e03d70fc47af5c9598b	[email protected]
Relion XE4112	189.bin	a36b6110347ba3628c0654aefe9089ee	[email protected]
Relion XE1114GT	189.bin	a36b6110347ba3628c0654aefe9089ee	[email protected]
Relion XE2112GT	189.bin	a36b6110347ba3628c0654aefe9089ee	[email protected]
Relion XE2118GT	189.bin	a36b6110347ba3628c0654aefe9089ee	[email protected]
Relion XE4118GT	189.bin	a36b6110347ba3628c0654aefe9089ee	[email protected]
Relion XE4118GTS	189.bin	a36b6110347ba3628c0654aefe9089ee	[email protected]
Relion XO1132g	189.bin	a36b6110347ba3628c0654aefe9089ee	[email protected]
Altus XE1111	189.bin	a36b6110347ba3628c0654aefe9089ee	[email protected]
Altus XE2111	189.bin	a36b6110347ba3628c0654aefe9089ee	[email protected]

Revision History

REVISION	DATE	DESCRIPTION
1	2019-07-19	Initial Release