Security Bulletin: Privilege Escalation / User Impersonation affects IBM Platform LSF and IBM Spectrum LSF

Summary

This is to address security vulnerabilities in IBM Spectrum LSF and IBM Platform LSF (Load Sharing Facility) that could allow a local attacker to impersonate arbitrary users to submit jobs to LSF, and possibly run LSF jobs as root.

LSF uses an external authentication framework to secure user credentials for the data stream between LSF clients and servers. By default, LSF provides an eauth executable file which takes a static authorization key to encrypt the data. As part of the installation process, changing the default key is important to prevent unauthorized access. However, many sites do not change this default key and are therefore vulnerable to CVE-2017-1205.

This issue was present and undetected for over ten years, even during previous third party security reviews. There are no reported instances of anyone having exploited this defect to gain root privileges.

This fix addresses CVE-2017-1205 by enhancing the default eauth executable file to automatically generate site-specific keys, and is available for all supported versions of LSF on all supported operating systems.

Sites that use LSF Kerberos authentication are not affected by this issue, but installing this fix addresses potential vulnerabilities if LSF Kerberos authentication is unavailable.