Software Engineering Institute

According to the researcher's report.:

"HP/H3C and Huawei networking equipment suffers from a serious weakness in regards to their handling of Systems Network Management Protocol (SNMP) requests for protected h3c-user.mib and hh3c-user.mib objects.

Details
Huawei/H3C have two OIDs, 'old' and 'new':

old: 1.3.6.1.4.1.2011.10
new: 1.3.6.1.4.1.25506

Most devices support both formats.

The MIBs h3c-user.mib and hh3c-user.mib, for the purpose of this document, will be referred to as (h)h3c-user.mib. This MIB defines the internal table and objects to "Manage configuration and Monitor running state for userlog feature."

This means there are some cool objects with data in this MIB penetration testers or malicious actors would want to get their dirty little hands on. Most objects are only accessible with the read/write community string.

In the revision history of (h)h3c-user.mib, version 2.0 modified the MAX-ACCESS from read-only to read-create the following objects within the (h)h3cUserInfoEntry sequence:

(h)h3cUserName
(h)h3cUserPassword
(h)h3cAuthMode
(h)h3cUserLevel

The purpose of these objects are to provide the locally configured users to those with a valid SNMP community. After the change only those with the read-write community string should have access, however this was not the case and the code still retained the earlier access of read-only.

So if you have the SNMP public community string then you have the ability to view these entries."

Additional information can be found in the researcher's report

A remote unauthenticated attacker can access administrative functions of the device using systems network management protocol (SNMP) requests.

Update

HP: Customers are advised to check HP's SSRT100962 support document for instructions.

Huawei Security Advisory states: "On Oct. 19, Huawei PSIRT noticed the media report titled “Demo of "serious" networking vulnerabilities cancelled at HP's request-Saturday's Toorcon talk was to discuss risks posed by gear from H3C and Huawei” . Huawei PSIRT responded immediately and proactively coordinate Kurt Grutzmacher, US-CERT, CERT/CC and CNCERT to handle the issue. On Oct. 24, Huawei PSIRT finally acquired the technical details of the vulnerabilities from the public channel of US-CERT and launched shortly the vulnerability analysis and investigation to develop the mitigation measures. The first version of “SNMP vulnerability on Huawei multiple products” SA was released on Oct. 25. The investigation is still ongoing. Huawei PSIRT will keep updating the SA. Please refer to the above link."

According to the researcher's report:

"By itself this is already bad but most users who do any of the following may already be protected:

Use complex SNMP community strings or disable SNMPv1
Have disabled the mib entries for (h)h3c-user
Block SNMP using access controls or firewalls
Do not define local users, use RADIUS or TACACS+

More specific routines can be found in the vendor's release."