An issue was discovered in Qualys Cloud Agent 4.8.0-49. It executes programs at various full pathnames without first making ownership and permission checks (e.g., to help ensure that a program was installed by root) and without integrity checks (e.g., a checksum comparison against known legitimate programs). Also, the vendor recommendation is to install this agent software with root privileges. Thus, privilege escalation is possible on systems where any of these pathnames is controlled by a non-root user. An example is /opt/firebird/bin/isql, where the /opt/firebird directory is often owned by the firebird user.

References

• https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2022-29549
• https://blog.qualys.com/product-tech/2022/08/15/qualys-security-updates-cloud-agent-for-linux
• https://blog.qualys.com/vulnerabilities-threat-research
• http://software.firstworks.com/p/getting-started-with-firebird.html
• http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2022/Sep/10
• http://packetstormsecurity.com/files/168367/Qualys-Cloud-Agent-Arbitrary-Code-Execution.html