Detection and Exploitation of Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) *

In cybersecurity, there exists a prevalent issue that heavily occurs in websites or in networks and that is the support of outdated software. One of the primary activities that an adversary will execute when it comes to attacking those environments, is to check and confirm the version of all the software, or libraries that are supported, and imported. For instance, a disclosed software vulnerability may take several days (even months, years) to be known by the majority of companies across the globe (institutions, enterprises, etc). Nowadays, a lot of enterprises’ system still supports the Intelligent Platform Management Interface, hence IPMI, to define communication protocols for talking both across a local bus as well as the network. Based on the version of the software in use, an attacker can obtain full access (supervisor, root, admin) to the system after a successful crack of its hash password. From this point of view, finding outdated software from a system is one of the starting points of the attacker’s activities, which can significantly jeopardize the entire system of the company. In this paper, a penetration test against a target host will be performed. In this scenario, a demonstration of how an attacker can detect the presence of this weakness will be provided as well as the steps of the exploitation. Subsequently, we will make use of the findings (exposed hashed text) and show how the attacker can obtain supervisor access to the front-end (web page) of the system. At the end of this paper, we will cover the remediation methods of this vulnerability that allowed us to the exploitation of the target’s system.