Overview:

Researchers have discovered a 17-year old critical Remote Code Execution vulnerability in a popular communication and data transfer protocol, Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) Daemon. This is considered as a major issue since the pppd software comes installed in almost all Linux-distributions by default. An unauthenticated attacker could exploit this vulnerability to execute arbitrary code on affected systems and take over the systems.

CVE assigned:

CVE-2020-8597

Affected Software's:

Point-to-Point Protocol Daemon versions 2.4.2 through 2.4.8

Solution:

To address this vulnerability, the pppd software has released patch for the same. For more information, please refer to our blog:

Use SanerNow platform to apply this critical patch quickly across the organization as shown below.

SanerNow:

Vulnerability detection and patching of PPP Daemon:

1. Login to SanerNow platform
2. Switch to the account/site specific view and Go to 'VM tool'
3. If your Application (PPP Daemon) is vulnerable, Saner lists the above CVEs in 'Top Vulnerabilities or 'Recently Discovered Vulnerabilities' as shown in the below diagram:

4. Search for this vulnerability in VM tool. If you are affected, apply the patch through PM -> Missing Patches.
5. Select 'Groups/Devices' in the 'Asset Source' section and click 'Apply'.
6. Select the product ‘ppp’ from the 'Asset' section as shown in the below image:

7. Select ‘Apply Selected Patches’ at the rightmost corner. This will prompt for ‘Creating Patch Task’. Fill in ‘Task Name’ and ‘Remediation Schedule' as per your preference and click on ‘Apply Selected Patches' as shown below

8. Remediation job will be created, which will fix the vulnerability by upgrading PPP to the latest patch version.
9. Once remediation is done, the Saner agent automatically scans again and uploads the result to SanerNow as shown below