Last revised: 11/17/2016

Summary

Palo Alto Networks firewalls do not properly validate certain environment variables which can potentially allow executing code with higher privileges (Ref # PAN-61104/100499/CVE-2016-9151)

Severity: Medium

A potential attacker with local shell access could manipulate arbitrary environment variables which could result in a process running with higher privileges.

Products Affected

PAN-OS 5.0.19 and earlier; PAN-OS 5.1.12 and earlier; PAN-OS 6.0.14 and earlier; PAN-OS 6.1.14 and earlier; PAN-OS 7.0.10 and earlier; PAN-OS 7.1.5 and earlier

Available Updates

PAN-OS 5.0.20 and later; PAN-OS 5.1.13 and later; PAN-OS 6.0.15 and later; PAN-OS 6.1.15 and later; PAN-OS 7.0.11 and later; PAN-OS 7.1.6 and later

Workarounds and Mitigations

Exploitation of this privilege escalation is restricted to local users. Potential attackers would have to first obtain a shell on the device before they could attempt to escalate privileges through this vulnerability.

Acknowledgements

Palo Alto Networks would like to thank Tavis Ormandy from the Google Security Team for reporting this issue to us.