McAfee Advanced Threat Defense - Sandbox Fingerprinting & Bypass (CVE-2015-8986)

Overview

"McAfee Advanced Threat Defense protects against advanced malware, including zero-day and advanced persistent threats, providing the strongest advanced threat protection available."

(www.mcafee.com/us/products/advanced-threat-defense.aspx)

Issue

The McAfee Advanced Threat Defense solution relies on a number of static configurations present across all deployments which, when chained together, could allow an attacker to detect the present of the sandbox within the environment.

Impact

A specially crafted binary could be created which, when analyzed by ATD, detects the present of the sandbox and runs benign code, but when run on the target, executes malicious code. To demonstrate this vulnerability, I created proof of concept code which detects the presence of the ATD sandbox via localhost FTP and the following static credentials:

User: Administrator
Password: cr@cker42

Timeline

October 21, 2014 - Notified McAfee via security@mcafee.com
November 4, 2014 - McAfee confirmed the vulnerability and provided a target date of December 31, 2014 to provide an updated version
January 15, 2015 - McAfee released a security update to resolve this issue

Solution

Upgrade to version 3.4.4.14 or later

https://kb.mcafee.com/corporate/index?page=content&id=SB10096

CVE-ID:

CVE-2015-8986

Questions?

Contact Information

Info-Sec.CA