Public ICS Disclosures – Week of 06-23-18

This week we have a vendor advisory and two updates of previously issued advisories from Siemens. Additionally, OSIsoft released a new version of their PI SDK 2018 that, according to the release notes, addresses (among other issues) “potential security issues in PI SDK code as identified by Synopsis Static Analysis (Coverity)”.

Siemens Advisory

This advisory describes “service of the affected products listening on all of the host’s network interfaces on either port 4884/TCP, 5885/TCP, or port 5886/TCP could allow an attacker to either exfiltrate limited data from the system or to execute code with Microsoft Windows user permissions”. The vulnerability was reported by Chris Bellows and HD Moore from Atredis Partners and Austin Scott from San Diego Gas and Electric. Siemens has provided new versions for some of the affected products to mitigate the vulnerability and identified work arounds for others. There is no indication that any of the researchers have been provided an opportunity to verify the efficacy of the fix.

RAPIDLab Update

This update provides new information on two vulnerabilities that was previously reported by Siemens on June 12^th, 2018. The new information is an acknowledgement that the vulnerabilities were reported by Oran Avraham from MEDIGATE. This advisory has not been reported by ICS-CERT.

Spectre and Meltdown Update

This update provides new information on the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities in Industrial Products that was last updated on May 29^th,  2018. The new information provides new version and mitigation information for HMI Panels with SIMATIC WinCC V14.

Commentary

You have to give OSIsoft credit for turning to an outside agency (Coverity) to have static code analysis done on their product. This independent evaluation is an example of going the extra mile in secure code development. What is not clear, however, from the release notes on this product is whether or not the code issues being corrected existed in the earlier versions of the development kit.

If the corrected vulnerabilities were in earlier versions, I would have preferred to see an enumeration of those vulnerabilities in a security advisory so that users could conduct a proper risk assessment to see if their situation necessitated an immediate upgrade to this newer version. OSIsoft has a strong history of identifying and correcting security issues, so I suspect that they felt that either the vulnerabilities were related just to new code or that they vulnerabilities in the previous code were so minor as to not require specific notification.