Downtime for Up.Time: time to patch some bugs

Server crash monitor easy to crash

Popular sysadmin tool Up.Time from Idera software needs patching, with bugs exposing it to denial-of-service attacks and possible remote code execution.

The bugs in the server monitoring tool (now known as Uptime Infrastructure Monitor), outlined by the Carnegie-Mellon CERT here, cover three CVEs: CVE-2015-2894, CVE-2015-2895 and CVE-2015-2896.

The first of these is an uncontrolled format string, in Up.Time 6.0 and 7.2, allowing an attacker to crash the application by sending %n or %s as format strings.

The second is your old friend, the buffer overflow. On version 7.4, an unauthenticated attacker on the network can send commands with inputs bigger than 1024 bytes to crash the application.

The third is an information exposure bug present on versions up to 7.6: an unauthenticated attacker can send commands to the port Up.Time is using. “These commands are not authenticated, and therefore the attacker can learn information such as the version of Up.time running, details about the underlying operating system running Up.time, details about other running processes on the system, and Windows operating system event log information.”

Idera says Version 7.6 fixes the first two bugs, and it's working on a fix for CVE-2015-2896. In the meantime, the advisory provides mitigation instructions covering agents operating in read-only mode; setting passwords for agents to use custom scripts; encryption for agent communications; and managing connections to agents. ®