CVE-2001-1477 in Tuxedo
Summary
by MITRE
The Domain gateway in BEA Tuxedo 7.1 does not perform authorization checks for imported services and qspaces on remote domains, even when an ACL exists, which allows users to access services in a remote domain.
If you want to get best quality of vulnerability data, you may have to visit VulDB.
Analysis
by VulDB Data Team • 06/04/2018
The vulnerability identified as CVE-2001-1477 resides within the Domain Gateway component of BEA Tuxedo 7.1, a distributed transaction processing platform designed for enterprise application integration. This flaw represents a critical authorization bypass issue that undermines the security model of the system's domain-to-domain communication mechanisms. The Domain Gateway serves as a bridge between different Tuxedo domains, facilitating service discovery and resource access across administrative boundaries. When the system processes imported services and qspaces from remote domains, it fails to enforce the access control lists that should normally govern such cross-domain interactions, creating a significant security gap in the platform's authorization framework.
The technical nature of this vulnerability stems from the absence of proper authorization validation within the Domain Gateway's service import and qspace access mechanisms. Even when explicit Access Control Lists are configured and active within the Tuxedo environment, the system does not perform the necessary checks to verify whether remote users possess appropriate permissions before granting access to imported services or qspaces. This represents a classic failure in the principle of least privilege, where the system assumes that users from remote domains should have the same access rights as local users, effectively bypassing the ACL enforcement mechanism that should govern such interactions. The flaw exists at the protocol level where remote domain requests are processed, indicating a fundamental design oversight in how the system handles cross-domain security boundaries.
The operational impact of this vulnerability is severe and multifaceted, potentially allowing unauthorized users to gain access to sensitive services and queues within remote domains without proper authentication or authorization. An attacker could exploit this weakness to access confidential data, manipulate business-critical services, or disrupt operations across multiple domains within the Tuxedo environment. The vulnerability is particularly dangerous because it operates at a foundational level of the distributed system architecture, meaning that once exploited, it could provide access to an entire network of interconnected services rather than isolated components. This creates a cascading security risk where compromise of a single domain could potentially lead to broader system infiltration, affecting the integrity and confidentiality of enterprise data across multiple administrative boundaries.
Organizations utilizing BEA Tuxedo 7.1 should implement immediate mitigations including disabling unnecessary domain gateway functionality, implementing additional network-level access controls, and ensuring that ACL configurations are properly enforced through alternative means. The vulnerability aligns with CWE-284, which describes improper access control issues, and represents a specific case where the system fails to properly implement authorization checks in distributed computing environments. From an ATT&CK perspective, this vulnerability maps to privilege escalation and lateral movement techniques, as it allows attackers to bypass access controls and move between domains within the same system. The most effective long-term solution involves applying the vendor-provided patches or upgrading to newer versions of the Tuxedo platform that properly implement authorization checks for imported services and qspaces, while also conducting thorough security assessments of domain boundary configurations to identify and remediate similar issues in other distributed components.