IBM Rational Products Backdoor Account Access

The IBM Rational is a web-based quality solution integrating the management and deployment of test environments within the quality management lifecycle. It incorporates Apache Tomcat to serve custom web applications.

To connect to a Tomcat application, a user must provide valid credentials. The user's username and password will be included in the "Authorization:" HTTP header with each request.

A security-restriction-bypass vulnerability exists in IBM Rational products. Tomcat stores its user credentials within the configuration file tomcat-users.xml. When IBM Rational is installed, the user ADMIN is added to the configuration file with a default password; the role "manager" is also associated with this user. In an attack scenario, a remote attacker can use these default credentials to upload and run arbitrary web applications on the vulnerable system, within the security context of the affected process.

For more information about this vulnerability, please see SecurityFocus bid 44172.

SonicWALL has released an IPS signature to detect and block specific exploitation attempts targeting these vulnerabilities. The signature is listed below:

• 5890 IBM Rational QM/TLM Default Account Access