CVE-2011-1860 in Service Manager
Summary
by MITRE
Unspecified vulnerability in HP Service Manager 7.02, 7.11, 9.20, and 9.21 and Service Center 6.2.8 allows remote attackers to capture HTTP session credentials via unknown vectors.
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Analysis
by VulDB Data Team • 01/14/2018
The vulnerability identified as CVE-2011-1860 represents a critical security flaw in HP Service Manager and Service Center products across multiple versions including 7.02, 7.11, 9.20, 9.21, and 6.2.8. This unspecified weakness creates a significant risk for organizations relying on these service management platforms for business-critical operations. The vulnerability specifically enables remote attackers to capture HTTP session credentials through unknown vectors, effectively undermining the authentication mechanisms that protect sensitive service management data and operational controls.
The technical nature of this vulnerability lies in its ability to exploit HTTP session management protocols within the HP Service Manager ecosystem. Session credential capture typically occurs when attackers can intercept or manipulate session tokens transmitted over HTTP connections, allowing them to impersonate legitimate users and gain unauthorized access to service management functionalities. This weakness particularly affects the authentication and session handling components of the software, creating potential entry points for malicious actors to escalate privileges and access restricted resources within the service management environment.
From an operational impact perspective, this vulnerability poses severe risks to enterprise service management infrastructures. Organizations utilizing these HP products may experience unauthorized access to critical service management data, including incident records, change requests, problem management databases, and configuration management databases. The ability to capture session credentials enables attackers to maintain persistent access to service management systems, potentially leading to data breaches, service disruption, and unauthorized modifications to service management processes. This vulnerability directly impacts the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of service management operations, which are fundamental to IT service delivery and business continuity.
The security implications extend beyond immediate credential theft to encompass broader attack surface exploitation. Attackers leveraging this vulnerability could potentially establish persistent backdoors within service management environments, making detection and remediation more challenging. The unspecified nature of the attack vectors suggests that multiple exploitation pathways may exist, increasing the complexity of defense strategies and making comprehensive vulnerability assessment more difficult for security teams. Organizations should consider implementing network monitoring solutions to detect anomalous session activity and credential interception attempts.
Mitigation strategies should focus on implementing secure session management practices and strengthening HTTP communication protocols. Organizations should immediately apply available security patches and updates from HP to address this vulnerability. Network segmentation and intrusion detection systems can help monitor for suspicious session activity and credential capture attempts. Additionally, implementing secure communication protocols such as HTTPS with strong encryption, enforcing session timeout policies, and regularly rotating session identifiers can significantly reduce the risk of exploitation. Security teams should also conduct comprehensive vulnerability assessments to identify similar weaknesses in related systems and ensure proper access controls are implemented throughout the service management infrastructure. This vulnerability aligns with CWE-306, which addresses missing authentication in security-critical functions, and may map to ATT&CK techniques involving credential access and privilege escalation through session hijacking.