CVE-2022-35800 in Azure Site Recovery VMWare to Azure
Summary
by MITRE • 08/10/2022
Azure Site Recovery Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability. This CVE ID is unique from CVE-2022-35774, CVE-2022-35775, CVE-2022-35780, CVE-2022-35781, CVE-2022-35782, CVE-2022-35783, CVE-2022-35784, CVE-2022-35785, CVE-2022-35786, CVE-2022-35787, CVE-2022-35788, CVE-2022-35789, CVE-2022-35790, CVE-2022-35791, CVE-2022-35799, CVE-2022-35801, CVE-2022-35802, CVE-2022-35807, CVE-2022-35808, CVE-2022-35809, CVE-2022-35810, CVE-2022-35811, CVE-2022-35812, CVE-2022-35813, CVE-2022-35814, CVE-2022-35815, CVE-2022-35816, CVE-2022-35817, CVE-2022-35818, CVE-2022-35819.
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Analysis
by VulDB Data Team • 09/04/2022
The Azure Site Recovery service represents a critical component within Microsoft's cloud infrastructure, providing disaster recovery capabilities for virtual machines and physical servers across on-premises and cloud environments. This service enables organizations to replicate workloads to Azure or other target locations, ensuring business continuity and data protection during catastrophic events. The vulnerability identified as CVE-2022-35800 specifically targets the privilege escalation mechanisms within this recovery service, creating a potential pathway for unauthorized users to gain elevated access rights beyond their intended permissions. Such a flaw directly impacts the security posture of organizations relying on Azure Site Recovery for their disaster recovery strategies, as it could allow attackers to move laterally within the system and potentially access sensitive data or critical infrastructure components.
This elevation of privilege vulnerability stems from insufficient access control validation within the Azure Site Recovery service implementation. The flaw allows authenticated users to manipulate system permissions and escalate their privileges to administrative levels without proper authorization checks. The technical nature of the vulnerability involves improper validation of user permissions during critical operations within the recovery service, enabling malicious actors to exploit this weakness through crafted requests or manipulated service calls. The vulnerability affects the underlying authentication and authorization mechanisms that govern access to recovery operations, potentially allowing attackers to perform actions such as modifying recovery plans, accessing protected data, or disrupting the recovery process itself. According to CWE classification, this vulnerability maps to CWE-284, which specifically addresses improper access control and inadequate privilege management within software systems. The issue demonstrates a fundamental flaw in the principle of least privilege enforcement, where users can bypass normal access restrictions to obtain elevated system privileges.
The operational impact of CVE-2022-35800 extends beyond simple privilege escalation, potentially enabling comprehensive system compromise and data exfiltration. Attackers exploiting this vulnerability could gain access to sensitive recovery data, manipulate backup configurations, and potentially disrupt disaster recovery processes that organizations depend upon for business continuity. The implications are particularly severe for organizations with complex disaster recovery environments where multiple recovery points and cross-region replication are configured. This vulnerability could also facilitate lateral movement within the Azure environment, as elevated privileges often provide access to additional resources and services. The potential for cascading effects means that compromise of the Site Recovery service could lead to broader system infiltration and data breaches. From an ATT&CK framework perspective, this vulnerability maps to privilege escalation techniques and could enable subsequent stages such as lateral movement and data collection, making it a critical concern for threat actors seeking persistent access to cloud environments.
Organizations should implement immediate mitigation strategies to protect their Azure Site Recovery deployments from exploitation of CVE-2022-35800. Microsoft has released security updates addressing this vulnerability, and administrators should prioritize applying these patches to all affected systems. Additional protective measures include implementing network segmentation to limit access to Site Recovery services, enforcing strict monitoring of authentication and authorization events, and conducting regular privilege audits to identify any unauthorized access patterns. The security configuration should include disabling unnecessary recovery service features and implementing role-based access controls with minimal required permissions. Organizations should also establish robust logging and alerting mechanisms specifically for Site Recovery service operations, enabling rapid detection of suspicious activities. Regular security assessments of Azure environments should include evaluation of access control configurations and privilege management systems. The vulnerability highlights the importance of maintaining up-to-date security measures and continuous monitoring of cloud services, as these elevated privilege flaws can provide attackers with extensive access to critical infrastructure components and sensitive data within cloud environments.