Firmware Vulnerabilities Show Supply Chain Risks

A recently announced pair of vulnerabilities in the firmware for baseboard management controllers (BMCs) used by at least eight different manufacturers' servers is the latest incident to show a supply chain vulnerability that can have an impact on enterprise computing. The affected firmware, MergePoint EMS, made by Avocent (now Vertiv), is used in servers from Lenovo, Acer, Gigabyte, Penguin Computing, and others.

BMCs monitor internal pieces of the system that include temperature, power-supply voltage, fan speeds, communications parameters, and certain operating system functions. The vulnerabilities were discovered by researchers at Eclypsium as part of their normal research activity.

One of the vulnerabilities involves the lack of security for firmware updates to the system, potentially allowing an attacker to write new instructions for the firmware while undetected. The other is a command injection vulnerability, which could potentially allow an attacker to inject random instructions into a running system.

Eclypsium writes that it followed responsible disclosure in notifying the affected vendors of the vulnerabilities. As of this time, Lenovo and Gigabyte have released patches for the issues.

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