Can dovecot be leveraged to exploit Solr/Log4shell?

John Fawcett
Tue, 14 Dec 2021 01:51:59 -0000

On 13/12/2021 23:43, Joseph Tam wrote:
>
> I'm surprised I haven't seen this mentioned yet.
>
> An internet red alert went out Friday on a new zero-day exploit. It is an
> input validation problem where Java's Log4j module can be instructed
via
> a specially crafted string to fetch and execute code from a remote LDAP
> server.? It has been designated the Log4shell exploit (CVE-2021-44228).
>
> Although I don't use it, I immediately thought of Solr, which provides
> some dovecot installations with search indexing.? Can dovecot be made
> to pass on arbitrary loggable strings to affected versions of Solr
> (7.4.0-7.7.3,
> 8.0.0-8.11.0)?
>
> Those running Solr to implement Dovecot FTS should look at
>
>
????https://solr.apache.org/security.html#apache-solr-affected-by-apache-log4j-cve-2021-44228
>
>
> Joseph Tam <jtam.home at gmail.com>

Solr logs the search strings passed, so potentially authenticated users
could log malicious strings by searching for them. I do see escaping of
some special characters in the log, but not sure if that would be a
sufficient mitigation. In my web server logs I see all kinds of patterns
that are trying to circumvent WAF rules, so maybe someone will come up
with a way of getting the malicious string into the solr log.

As Apache Solr is mentioned as one of the software that is impacted, the
mitigations are to upgrade to a non vulnerable version asap and in the
meantime turn off JNDI lookups.

John