published July 27, 2020
SteelCentral Aternity Agent 11.0.0.120 on Windows mishandles IPC. It uses an executable running as a high privileged Windows service to perform administrative tasks and collect data from other processes. It distributes functionality among different processes and uses IPC (Inter-Process Communication) primitives to enable the processes to cooperate. Any user in the system is allowed to access the interprocess communication channel AternityAgentAssistantIpc, retrieve a serialized object and call object methods remotely. Among others, the methods allow any user to: (1) Create and/or overwrite arbitrary XML files across the system; (2) Create arbitrary directories across the system; and (3) Load arbitrary plugins (i.e., C# assemblies) from the "%PROGRAMFILES(X86)/Aternity Information Systems/Assistant/plugins” directory and execute code contained in them.